There is, perhaps, nothing so difficult in the world to translate as stories dealing with Russian peasants. The simplicity and directness of their speech are the despair of the translator; and to translate them properly would require literary talent at once as great and as delicate as the author’s. Mrs. Garnett’s version of Tourgeniev’s work is admirable; yet in reading the translation of the _Sportsman’s Sketches_, and comparing it with the original, one feels that the task is an almost impossible one. Some writers, Rudyard Kipling for instance, succeed in conveying to us the impression which is made by the conversation of men in exotic countries. When Rudyard Kipling gives us the speech of an Indian, he translates it into simple and biblical English. There is no doubt this is the right way to deal with the matter; it is the method which was adopted with perfect success by the great writers of the eighteenth century, the method of Fielding and Smollett in dealing with the conversation of simple men. One cannot help thinking that it is a mistake, in translating the speech of people like Russian peasants, or Indians, or Greeks, however familiar the speech may be, to try to render it by the equivalent colloquial or slang English. For instance, Mrs. Garnett, in translating one of Tourgeniev’s masterpieces, _The Singers_, turns the Russian words “nie vryosh” (Art thou not lying?) by “Isn’t it your humbug?” In the same story she translates the Russian word “molchat” by the slang expression “shut up.” Now “shut up” might, in certain circumstances, be the colloquial equivalent of “molchat”; but the expression conveyed is utterly false, and it would be better to translate it simply “be silent”; because to translate the talk of the Russian peasant into English colloquialisms conveys precisely the same impression, to any one familiar with the original, which he would receive were he to come across the talk of a Scotch gillie translated into English cockney slang. This may seem a small point, but in reality it is the chief problem of all translation, and especially of that translation which deals with the talk and the ways of simple men. It is therefore of cardinal importance, when the material in question happens to be the talk of Russian peasants; and I have seen no translation in which this mistake is not made. How great the beauty of the original must be is proved by the fact that even in a translation of this kind one can still discern it, and that one receives at least a shadow of the impression which the author intended to convey. If the _Sportsman’s Sketches_ be the masterpiece of Tourgeniev, he rose to the same heights once more at the close of his career, when he wrote the incomparable _Poems in Prose_. Here once more he touched the particular vibrating string which was his special secret, and which thrills and echoes in the heart with so lingering a sweetness.