Latest News

Another interesting review and discussion of the translation, in the New Yorker, by James Woods. Again, it's not entirely safe reading if you have not completed the novel, but it's an excellent piece, both about Tolstoy:

Babel’s conceit, about Tolstoy’s work being so life-filled that he somehow does not seem to write at all, has been the dominant modern tribute paid to the Master’s animism, from Matthew Arnold’s admonition that we should take “Anna Karenina” not as a work of art but as a “piece of life” to A. N. Wilson’s assertion that “War and Peace,” “for seven-eighths of the time . . . does not feel as if it is being narrated at all.” The paradox is not only that “War and Peace” can seem unwritten, even though the accumulated drafts amount to five thousand pages. It is also that its author can seem unread, someone who has never needed to read anybody else’s fiction..

and the translation:

Richard Pevear, in an eloquent introduction, provides a startling example of the ways in which translators do not simply tidy up texts but make things “clear” that they deem obscure. In the novel’s epilogue, Marya enters the nursery: “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to come with them.” That is exactly what Tolstoy writes, because he wants us to experience a little shock of readjustment as the adult meets the otherworldliness of childish fantasy. But Garnett, the Maudes, and Briggs all insert an explanatory “playing at,” to make things easier for the adults. As the Maudes render it, “The children were playing at ‘going to Moscow’ in a carriage made of chairs, and invited her to go with them.”

This might seem like a trivial point, but it is a little clue to the vision of the whole novel. Tolstoy sees reality as a system of constant adjustments, a long, tricky convoy of surprises, as realities jostle together and the vital, solipsistic ego is affronted by the otherness of the world.