Hacker Cinema
The Woman with the 5 Elephants
Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten
2010 · Film · documentary · 93 min
Directed by Vadim Jendreyko
Documentary about Svetlana Geier, a Ukranian who has translated the great works of Dostoyevsky into German. First her father ends up in one of Stalin's prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and gets work as a translator before ending up in a German camp in 1943. Now, 65 years later, she is a renowned translator who in her twilight years has translated the great works of Dostoevsky. For the first time in all these years, she returns to Kiev together with her granddaughter.
1 positivefrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1 comment on Hacker News
Svetlana Geier, the German Dostoyevsky translator, is/was much more famous/uncontested. They even made an excellent movie about her: “The Woman With the 5 Elephants”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/movies/dostoyevsky-translator-woman-with-the-5-elephants-film-review.html
Regarding P&V:
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/