Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky translation by Olena Bormashenko (1 star)

Very meh. It's interesting because I see some people saying this is legendary among Russian speakers, and some quotes apparently made it into common language and usage, which is the hallmark of a true classic. A fair bit of it is like watching two drunk people have what they think is a really deep and meaningful conversation but to anyone sober it's just boring. 

Perhaps too much is lost in translation...but I loved roadside picnic by the same translator? I suspect the part that doesn't do well in the translation is the humour. It swings between fairly heavy handed, hey don't kill all the scientists and intellectuals or you will destroy society philosophy:

No country can develop without science—it will be destroyed by its neighbors. Without arts and general culture, the country loses its capacity for self-criticism, begins to encourage faulty tendencies, starts to constantly spawn hypocrites and scum, develops consumerism and conceit in its citizens, and eventually again becomes a victim of its more sensible neighbors.

and Monty Python moments:

Is it true that you have hemorrhoids?

I get that this was an incredibly important subversive text of its time, wrapping up a political message in sci-fi. but it doesn't hold up well through time or translation. It's only very notionally sci-fi too, the main character is an alien, but you wouldn't know it without him telling you and the occasional demonstrations of advanced technology that don't fit the otherwise medieval world.

It certainly isn't without quotable moments:

And if the fates decreed for one of them to be born or become a master, he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave—a slave of wealth, a slave of outlandish excesses, a slave of his slaves. The vast majority of them weren’t guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery.

Everyone is free to understand this in his own way. For us scholars, evil is in ignorance, but the church teaches that ignorance is a blessing and that all evil comes from knowledge.

there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are, Don Rumata, and that’s how our world is.”

“Cruelty is power. Having lost their cruelty, the princes would lose their power, and other cruel men would replace them.”  

1 star.