Greetings dramacels and !bookworms 
As promised, today we are holding our first bookclub discussion thread. We’ll be discussing the first 7 chapters of “The Master and Margarita”, written by the late Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, set in Stalinist Moscow 
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I hope you have enjoyed these first chapters, I certainly did. Based on the numbers of pages read from chapters 1-7, next week discussion will be about chapters 8-17.
I know it was supposed to be at noon E.T. However I’m posting a bit early because I’m off for a family lunch in half an hour, and I don’t want to longpost there.
Have fun with the discussion!
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By the way, regarding the quality of translation, I read the first chapter in Burgin and O’Connor's, and it's OK I guess? One thing that immediately jumps out is that the original is written in a little bit archaic and folksy Russian, not like what Shakespeare is to to modern English but just what you'd expect from something written 100 years ago, which gives it a certain charm. The translation doesn't have that feel at all (and to be fair one of the translators' goals stated in the preface was to produce a modern English translation, and I'm not sure it could be replicated faithfully anyway).
As for questionable translation choices, here's a couple I've noticed in the first chapter:
They didn't get apricot juice, they got apricot water, which as you might imagine meant something different in the Soviet Union and explained why "the air started smelling like a barbershop" and the hiccups lol. As in, it's still a soft drink, but its pedigree wrt actual apricots was much more questionable than the "juice" implies.
“suppose you were to start controlling others and yourself, and just as you developed a taste for it, so the speak, you suddenly went and … well … got lung cancer …”—at which point the foreigner chuckled merrily, as if the thought of lung cancer brought him pleasure. “Yes, cancer,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes like a cat as he savored the sonorous word, “and there goes your control!-- in the original it's "sarcoma of the lung", which is indeed more sonorous and much more foreboding, idk why they changed it.“The brick is neither here nor there,” interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, “it never merely falls on someone’s head from out of nowhere.I'd translate that part as"The brick for no reason,” interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, “will never and nobody drop on the head of".idk, it's hard to translate to preserve the cadence while not sounding stilted, but that "neither here nor there" just wasn't in the original while "never and nobody" was but too bad it's hard to fit in grammatically.I'd say that it appears to be a pretty good translation overall. The stuff above just shows that translation is inherently difficult.
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All them words won't bring your pa back.
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Translations are so important. I initially read Anna Karenina in the old 'Tolstoy' approved English translation from the 1950s, which was fine. But then I found a modern 2013 translation that kept it closer to the Russian 'folksy' language of the time and it was 2x better (to the point I re-read multiple chapters) and much funnier/cutting. For a dark humour book like Margarita it's probably more important to get that across, as much as you can at least.
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Translating a book is indeed super hard. I read Lolita in the original English, and the prose was so complex I have no idea how to translate that into Portuguese without sounding weird and unnatural. It’s probably easier with plot driven books which don’t rely on prose and writing style, books like Harry Potter for instance. Is a shame Russian is so hard, I would love to read their books in the original, but there are only so many languages we can learn with the time we have available
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