War And Peace

In the introduction to his Don Quixote, John Rutherford divides translators into cavaliers and puritans. The cavalier takes some liberties; the puritan is a stickler for exactitude. Rutherford’s intention was to combine the virtues of both and avoid their vices, a sensible if difficult plan. The previous translations of War and Peace have erred slightly too much on the puritan side, literal fidelity being set at a higher premium than writing naturally in English. It is now time to move somewhat in the other direction.

Let me give a couple of small examples. If a Russian asks, ‘Did you study in Kiev?’, another Russian will respond by saying, ‘In Kiev’. The puritan will use that repetition, while the cavalier would give the normal English speaker’s response, ‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, I did.’ Similarly, when a Russian mother says to her child, ‘Ne nado!’, the puritan will be tempted to render this literally as ‘That’s not necessary!’, whereas the cavalier will go for ‘Don’t!’

The reason for this puritanism is not far to seek. It lies in what Rutherford refers to as a ‘mistaken attitude of reverence for the original artist beside whom it’s all too easy to feel like humble artisans who can only ever aspire to produce a pale shadow of the original . . . a self-fulfilling prediction . . . Literary translators must conquer these fears.’¹¹ This is good advice. Without ever drifting too far away from the original, it does seem reasonable to aim for the kind of English that would have occurred naturally in its context and now sounds appropriate.

Another way to look at this is to imagine how the average Russian reads War and Peace and to try to recapture something similar in the translated text. Tolstoy’s literary style has its faults – such as undue repetition, grammatical inaccuracy and some sentences of excessive length¹² – and many of them have to be faithfully reproduced in order to avoid falsification, but by and large he is an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualized but always natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue. In rendering colloquial speech, of course, a translator has to choose a particular regional dialect and its idioms, and I have used a British English form of speech, without, I hope, making the text unnatural for non-British readers.

The first edition (1868—9) of the novel had long passages in French. But Tolstoy had second thoughts and removed most of them during a drastic revision in 1873. Previous translators cut these further and provided translations in footnotes. But few readers today have a sound knowledge of French, so I have decided to translate all of it.

Does this change matter? Sometimes it does, but it is possible to indicate that a speaker is using another language. It is not unusual for Tolstoy himself to say (in Russian), for example, ‘Since Pierre was speaking French at the time he . . .’ I have used this kind of formula on those few occasions when a linguistic choice or shift has real significance, e.g. in the second paragraph on the opening page. It remains true that certain characters – Bilibin, for example – lose some of their finesse because of this treatment, but there seems to be an overall gain in following the lead established by Tolstoy (and the Maudes with his blessing) by making the text more directly accessible.

A Note on the Text

For almost a century several editions of War and Peace vied for acceptance. The first book version appeared in six volumes (four in 1868 and two in 1869), but was riddled with errors, nearly 2,000 of them. Then, in 1873 Tolstoy published his revised edition. In the 1930s Russian scholars preparing the Jubilee Edition of the Complete Works of L. N. Tolstoy decided to use the fifth edition of 1886, even though Tolstoy had not been involved in its publication, but they did incorporate some of the 1873 emendations (a second edition was based on the 1873 text). When it was discovered later that numerous changes in the 1873 edition had been introduced by N. N. Strakhov, most of them without Tolstoy’s approval, a team of scholars led by E. Zaydenshnur set about the formidable task of collating and comparing all versions, including the manuscripts, copies (mainly in Sonya Tolstoy’s hand), annotated editions, and corrected or half-corrected proofs, with the goal of eliminating any alterations introduced by outsiders. Their work bore fruit in the early 1960s, when a truly definitive text emerged, from which all subsequent editions derive.