“Vinokur inspires confidence in his ability to produce an edition of Babel's stories that will be more faithful to the original, both literally and stylistically, than any other available in English.”
—Carol J. Avins, editor of Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary and author of Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature, 1917-1934
"To translate Babel is to attempt to invent, or reinvent, a language—a Jewish language—particularly given Babel’s predilection for marrying the argot of the underworld with highly sophisticated narration. . . . Vinokur is willing to experiment. Vinokur also pays close attention to names, one of Babel’s specialties: street names, Yiddish names, Slavic names, and especially nicknames." —Jewish Review of Books
“Isaac Babel wrote amazingly powerful, stinging sentences of almost brutal, always poetic compactness. It is a gift to have these sentences in this collection of Babel’s stories and short essays, translated by the talented Val Vinokur. Babel, one of the greatest writers in Russian in the 20th century, was murdered by Stalin's secret police in 1940. He was 45. This wonderful book is a reminder of what Soviet brutality destroyed." —Richard Bernstein, former book critic for the The New York Times and columnist for The International Herald Tribune
“Vinokur gets the right effect most often” —The New York Review of Books
"[Vinokur’s] translations were done with attention, knowledge, and deference to the works of Isaac Babel–but most importantly, the personal inspiration and energy which he lent this great writer in the English language… Vinokur... has created a single volume that would, as the title suggests, encompass what he sees as all of Babel’s essential fictions–including [Red Cavalry and the Odessa Tales] along with over twenty other stories, creating a perspective on the author’s life and work. This perspective is evident in his notes, which offer a running commentary on stylistic and thematic issues present in Babel’s work, and also provide a window into the translation process." —David Stromberg, Public Seminar
"Vinokur's lucid translation brilliantly conveys the vivid precision and the emotional edge of Isaac Babel's prose to the English-language reader." —Anya Ulinich, author of Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel and Petropolis
"The translations by Val Vinokur are a delight. Editions of Babel's work in the original Russian were later censored and cut to fit with Stalinist orthodoxy. Here we get the stories as they were originally intended, whether on the struggles faced by Jewish people in the Odessa of Babel's childhood or the horrors that he witnessed in the Russian-Polish war." —The Socialist Review
“Val Vinokur [has] produced readable English translations sensitively attuned to Babel’s demanding Russian prose and its intertextual nuances… the English-speaking reader now has a valuable ‘essential’ edition of the major works of a lost genius swallowed up by the Stalinist terror whose work has been rescued by scholars and translators for posterity.” –The Russian Review
