Crime and Punishment in Translation: Raskolnikov Redeemed

Until one determined, nearly blind housewife came onto the literary scene, most Westerners had never heard of Dostoevsky without having a personal background in the Russian Language. Constance Garnett provided the first comprehensive translations of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev to the English-speaking world; but only after she taught herself the Russian language. Her translations have been continually edited and revised since the early 20th century, and were the most widely read editions for almost 70 years. A recent surge of translations from the husband-wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky is beginning to change the face of Western understanding of Dostoevsky and his peers—but is this change for the better? The P&V translations (as they are called in literary magazines) remain very literal and are intent on keeping the Russian prose as pure as possible. They do not wish to Anglicize the literature, but many of the P&V critics claim that these translations are butchering the spirit of the Russian text. This debate is igniting some important questions in the world of literary translation. What is more important: textual literalism, or faith to the spirit of the novel? Who is best set to the task of translation: a native Slavophil, such as Volokhonsky, or someone steeped in the target culture that knows what will be palatable to English speakers? In this paper, I want to demonstrate the benefits of reading multiple translations of a novel. I will compare key scenes from 3 to 4 different versions of Crime and Punishment: the McDuff translation (Penguin Classics, read in class); the Sidney Monas translation (Signet Classics, bought by accident—might not use for space); the golden standard Constance Garnett translation (Barnes & Noble Classics, personal copy); and the controversial Pevear/Volokhonsky translation (if I can find it from a library). A broad analysis of these translations will be used to show that Raskolnikov\u27s redemption at the end of the novel is not ambiguous, but rather obvious

Dielectric-Branes

We extend the usual world-volume action for a Dp-brane to the case of N coincident Dp-branes where the world-volume theory involves a U(N) gauge theory. The guiding principle in our construction is that the action should be consistent with the familiar rules of T-duality. The resulting action involves a variety of potential terms, i.e., nonderivative interactions, for the nonabelian scalar fields. This action also shows that Dp-branes naturally couple to RR potentials of all form degrees, including both larger and smaller than p+1. We consider the dynamics resulting from this action for Dp-branes moving in nontrivial background fields, and illustrate how the Dp-branes are ``polarized'' by external fields. In a simple example, we show that a system of D0-branes in an external RR four-form field expands into a noncommutative two-sphere, which is interpreted as the formation of a spherical D2-D0 bound state.Comment: 33 pages, Latex, 2 ref.'s added, few typo's fixe

Phase diagrams of SU(N) gauge theories with fermions in various representations

We minimize the one-loop effective potential for SU(N) gauge theories including fermions with finite mass in the fundamental (F), adjoint (Adj), symmetric (S), and antisymmetric (AS) representations. We calculate the phase diagram on S^1 x R^3 as a function of the length of the compact dimension, beta, and the fermion mass, m. We consider the effect of periodic boundary conditions [PBC(+)] on fermions as well as antiperiodic boundary conditions [ABC(-)]. The use of PBC(+) produces a rich phase structure. These phases are distinguished by the eigenvalues of the Polyakov loop P. Minimization of the effective potential for QCD(AS/S,+) results in a phase where | Im Tr P | is maximized, resulting in charge conjugation (C) symmetry breaking for all N and all values of (m beta), however, the partition function is the same up to O(1/N) corrections as when ABC are applied. Therefore, regarding orientifold planar equivalence, we argue that in the one-loop approximation C-breaking in QCD(AS/S,+) resulting from the application of PBC to fermions does not invalidate the large N equivalence with QCD(Adj,-). Similarly, with respect to orbifold planar equivalence, breaking of Z(2) interchange symmetry resulting from application of PBC to bifundamental (BF) representation fermions does not invalidate equivalence with QCD(Adj,-) in the one-loop perturbative limit because the partition functions of QCD(BF,-) and QCD(BF,+) are the same. Of particular interest as well is the case of adjoint fermions where for Nf > 1 Majorana flavour confinement is obtained for sufficiently small (m beta), and deconfinement for sufficiently large (m beta). For N >= 3 these two phases are separated by one or more additional phases, some of which can be characterized as partially-confining phases.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, JHEP3; references added, small corrections mad