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This novel has been well served by its several translators into English. Only the very first attempt suffers from serious shortcomings, but it was a brave undertaking by Clara Bell, less than twenty years after publication (1885—6). She worked from a French text created by a woman identified only as ‘Une Russe’, and her version is surprisingly effective, though much of the original has been omitted and what survives is nearer to paraphrase than translation. The early translations by N. H. Dole (1889) and Leo Wiener (1904) were more accurate, though they still contain plenty of small slips and their American phrasing now has an archaic ring. Constance Garnett, the admirable early doyen of Russian literature in English translation, produced a sensitive version in 1904; she had a delicate feel for language, though there are some errors. Then, in 1923, came the masters, Louise and Aylmer Maude, who lived in Russia and had the advantage of being able to consult Tolstoy himself. He gave their work his personal endorsement, even claiming that ‘better translators . . . could not be invented’.10 Their version of War and Peace, now fast approaching its centenary, is still read as a classic in its own right, and the errors that it contains are so few as to be negligible. It has been succeeded by Rosemary Edmonds’s equally reliable (at times derivative) translation (1957), which Penguin has used for nearly half a century (updated in 1978), and then by a sound American version, by Ann Dunnigan, in 1968.

So why do we need another translation?

It is not unusual for the great classics to be retranslated every couple of generations. Language changes and, without worshiping modernity for its own sake, publishers recognize the need to accommodate new readers by using phrasing more closely attuned to their way of speaking. Infelicities will be edited out, such as ‘Andrey spent the evening with a few gay friends’, ‘Natasha went about the house flushing’, ‘he exposed himself on the parade ground’ or ‘he ejaculated with a grimace’; we cannot read these without raising an inappropriate smile. On the other hand, it is most important not to over-modernize. Tempting though it may be, I cannot use popularized phrases like ‘buzzword’, ‘oddball’ or ‘hooliganism’.

Secondly, a translator hopes to squeeze out one or two errors or ambiguities that still linger. Previous translators have missed that an object referred to in a famous Tolstoyan metaphor about things colliding and recoiling is not a ball in flight but a billiard ball on the table; and they all translated the phrase ‘smotret’ ispodlob’ya’ as ‘to look at from under the brows’ when it means to look sullenly or furtively.

But these reasons are hardly enough to justify a new translation. There is one way in which all the existing versions fall short: from Constance Garnett onwards they have been produced by women of a particular social and cultural background (Louise having contributed more than Aylmer to the Maudes’ version), with some resulting flatness and implausibility in the dialogue, especially that between soldiers, peasants and all the lower orders. For example, Pierre, watching as a cannonball crashes down into the Rayevsky redoubt and takes a man’s leg off, hears another soldier call out in response: ‘Ekh! Neskladnaya!’ (III, II, 31). The English versions of this are: ‘Ekh! You beastly thing!’ (Dole); ‘Oh, awkward one!’ (Weiner); ‘Hey, awkward hussy!’ (Garnett); ‘Awkward baggage!’ (Maude); ‘Oh you hussy!’ (Edmonds); ‘Ah, you’re a bungler!’ (Dunnigan). Curiously enough the best is Clara Bell’s: ‘Ah, you brute!’ The original, with connotations of both awkwardness and femininity, is rather difficult to translate, but one thing is certain: no soldier in the heat of battle ever said anything like most of the phrases we have been offered so far.

The previous translations also have an excess of niceness and exactitude that can sound jarring to today’s readers. Natasha looks in the mirror and says: ‘Can this be I?’ Lavrushka is sent off ‘in quest of fowls’. More than once we hear that ‘Pierre fell to musing’. Elsewhere someone says: ‘Ay, listen what folks are prating of’. Similarly, there must be better ways of saying: ‘The crushing weight of his arm fell impotent as though spellbound’, or ‘the resolutive moment of battle had come’. Non-existent English exclamations like ‘Ay!’, ‘Ey!’, ‘Ekh!’ or the misused ‘Eh!’ still abound. In such old-fashioned phrasing I have tried to make improvements.


This is not to denigrate the translations that have been enjoyed by millions; it is merely to indicate I follow a general philosophy of translation that is slightly different from what has gone before.

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