Doctor, writer, restless traveler: Anton Chekhov packed a lot of living into his 44 years. Among other things, he was a keen observer of the people with whom he came into contact, whether tubercular patients, convicts in the deep forests of Siberia, or bons vivants in the seaside resort of Yalta, where he lived. He wrote dozens of short stories, asserting to a friend, “What makes literature art is precisely its depiction of life as it really is. Its charge is the unconditional and honest truth.”

Chekhov’s stories are among the best work in the entire world corpus of short fiction. The new anthology Fifty-Two Stories (Knopf, April 16), selected and translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, represents the Russian writer at his greatest, and it highlights his various approaches to storytelling, from matter-of-fact to satirical and downright comic.

Pevear and Volokhonsky have been working at the art and craft of translation since the 1970s. As Pevear tells Kirkus from the couple’s home in Paris, “I more or less married into Russian when I married Larissa. Russian was always being spoken among friends in our house. Our children grew up speaking Russian as well as English. So I acquired an almost native feeling for the language.”

Their collaboration as translators began, Pevear adds, when he was reading a new translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Volokhonsky began reading a Russian edition in parallel, came across a thorny passage, and asked him, “How did they translate this?” She looked at the English and said, “Ah, I see—they didn’t!”

That omission set them on a new course of translating the Russian classics, including Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina—indisputably one of the greatest books in any language—and smaller but still challenging works such as the short stories of Nikolai Leskov, which turn on proverbs, folk wisdom, old fairy tales and, as Pevear says, “are deeply embedded in Russian language, in Russian speech, in play on words and voicing.”

A native Russian, Volokhonsky begins the process of translation by making a literal, word-by-word trot through the entire text, annotating any ambiguities or particularities of style or word choice. Pevear then makes a complete second version from the first, one that is “literary” to the extent that the original is. Volokhonsky edits that translation, comparing it again to the original Russian text, and returns it to Pevear with additional changes. “The result is a ‘final’ version,” says Pevear, “that goes to the publisher and then comes back to us two or three times in the form of editors’ queries and page proofs.” Adds Volokhonsky, “At the final stage, too, Richard reads it aloud and I follow with the original. It is important to hear how it sounds.”

What is also important, Pevear remarks, is to produce a text that brings Russian and English into conversation, allowing the English to be influenced as much as possible by the Russian, as with a tale in Fifty-Two Stories that begins, “The woodturner Grigori Petrov, long known as an excellent craftsman and at the same time as the most good-for-nothing peasant in the whole Galchinsky district, is taking his sick old wife to the local hospital.” It’s not quite idiomatic American English; instead, you can hear the Russian underneath it, which is precisely the effect that the translators want to convey. Says Pevear, “Translation should enrich the language of arrival.”

There are difficulties in getting to just the right words, too. As Volokhonsky notes, Russian speech is full of endearments and curses that have no precise equivalent in English. So worldly a writer as Chekhov presents further difficulties with the specialized language of “hunting, card playing, horses’ harnesses, qualities of dog breeds, and so on.” One thing seems true, she adds, and that’s to mistrust what seems superficially easy: “Usually simplicity turns out to be very complex,” she says.What does it take to be a translator? The two enumerate some desired qualities, including skill at reading and writing—and, adds Volokhonsky, “extensive experience in reading all sorts of books from different periods and styles.” Maturity and life experience help, too.

Pevear and Volokhonsky select the books they wish to translate and shop them around, with a few exceptions, such as their translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which Pantheon commissioned. Next on their list is another book of Chekhov’s, a collection of his one-act plays. It’s a challenge, says Pevear, adding, “That’s the trouble with perfection.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.