There is a comforting illusion that translation is a technical matter. That if one knows the source language well enough and the target language well enough, the task becomes one of competence rather than judgment. The Master and Margarita quietly destroys that illusion.
Bulgakov’s novel is difficult not only because of its references or its structure, but because it operates on several moral temperatures at once. A cat pays bus fare while a man is beheaded. Satan presides over a theological judgment. The grotesque and the sacred share the same sentence. The novel shifts registers without warning, and often without explanation. Any translation is therefore not just a linguistic exercise, but a series of decisions about what kind of book the reader is going to meet. I have translated this novel into Swedish, so I know these challenges firsthand.
Recently, I recorded a video comparing four English translations: those by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, Hugh Aplin, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Mirra Ginsburg. I chose four passages and read them aloud side by side, not to crown a winner, but to listen carefully to how each version thinks.
What emerges very quickly is that translation is not a matter of right and wrong, but of priorities.
Some translators believe the greatest service to a reader is to make the text feel natural, even comfortable. Others believe that discomfort is part of the original experience, and that smoothing it away is a betrayal. You can hear these differences in the opening paragraph, in how heat and time are arranged. You can hear them in moments of power and fear, where Russian syntax compresses emotion into grammar rather than explanation. You can hear them most clearly in satire, where humor depends on a delicate balance between politeness and menace.
What struck me most was not how different the translations are, but how coherent each one is on its own terms. None of these translators are careless. All are serious readers of Bulgakov. But they are serious in different ways.
Pevear and Volokhonsky allow English to strain in order to preserve Russian logic. Their Bulgakov feels austere, procedural, sometimes unforgiving. Aplin makes similar structural choices, but shapes the prose so it can be spoken and sustained. Burgin and O’Connor write with narrative confidence and emotional vividness, sometimes heightening what the Russian keeps cool. Ginsburg offers clarity and flow, often at the cost of foreignness, but with an instinct for readability that has introduced generations of readers to the novel.
Each translation answers an implicit question: what do we owe the reader, and what do we owe the book?
The Master and Margarita is deeply concerned with responsibility, with who speaks for whom. Translation participates in those same questions. To translate is to speak in another’s voice while knowing it can never fully be your own.
That is why I resist the idea of a single best translation. For a first encounter, a smoother path may be the right one. For a second reading, resistance can be illuminating. A great novel reveals different aspects of itself depending on how it is met.
I hope this comparison helps you find not the right translation in the abstract, but the right one for you, here and now.
