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troika of new translations of Tolstoy's great War and Peace ...
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War and translation
A troika of new translations of Tolstoy's great War and Peace may have readers excited, but Donna Orwin cautions that all translations necessarily simplify the original work
DONNA ORWIN
January 5, 2008
We are riding a wave of three new translations of War and Peace (Anthony Briggs for Penguin; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky for Knopf; and Andrew Bromfield for Ecco Press) - or rather two and a half, because Bromfield has translated an early draft of the novel. Of the two complete ones, the general opinion seems to be that the Pevear/Volokhonsky is better, but this is not my subject. Publicity and controversy will get people reading the novel, and that's a good thing.
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Literal translations bring problems of their own, however; they can be incomprehensible in English, or just plain awkward. A famous example from Russian to English is Vladimir Nabokov's 1964 translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in which a passion for literalness killed the poetry in the novel-poem. (The notes to the translation are wonderful, and much longer than the poem.)
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There are translations - especially, but not always, of sacred texts - that become classics in the new language. The King James Bible comes to mind, or philosopher Thomas Hobbes's translation of the Greek historian Thucydides, or Boris Pasternak's translations into Russian of Shakespeare. Usually, though, it's best to think of a good new translation as an interpretation of a book for a few generations. You won't get the whole thrill of War and Peace when you read it in translation, but you still are reading one of the greatest novels ever written. It's long, but Tolstoy does not repeat himself in it, and you will be sorry when it ends. And by the way, don't skip the war parts; they are magnificent and, today, sadly, they are once again very relevant.
Donna Orwin teaches Slavic languages and literature at the University of Toronto, She is author of the recently published Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy.
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