It's readable, provided you know so little of Russia and its court circles of the time
Larry Send a noteboard - 21/02/2011 05:34:56 AM
Two non-Russians translating War and Peace at the height of the first Red Scare - it sounds positively awful.
Well, they were English, if that helps any. Not that it improves what odd choices they made with translations of names and orthography.
The things that you've said about the Easton Press just reinforce everything that I keep saying about translations! I was looking, after I read Siddhartha in German, at amazon.com's English versions because I was thinking of linking the book, but apparently there's a big translation scandal (based on the comments) about that book, too.
You should see what they've done with Rousseau's Confessions:
Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme ce sera moi.
Easton: I am undertaking a work which has no example, and whose execution will have no imitator. I mean to lay open to my fellow-mortals a man just as nature wrought him; and this man is myself.
Might as well be reading a Babelfish translation with those tense shifts and the changing of meaning regarding the veracity of nature.
I may write a separate review of War and Peace at some point just to expand on the reason that War and Peace is universally read in Russia but not with the same fervor that accompanies the reading of other authors and works. As with most great writers (yet another way in which real literature and bad derivative genre fiction differ), it is very hard to separate Tolstoy the man with Tolstoy the writer and his books.
I think that would be valuable, as I can only cover so much, being so ignorant of Russian culture/language and how Tolstoy was received then and now.
The entire phenomenon of "Tolstoyism" was a highly controversial one. Tolstoy remains a heretic for the Orthodox Church, and most Russians find his ideology dissatisfying. I personally loathe his elevation of the Russian peasant (honestly, I would probably loathe the elevation of any group in the way Tolstoy does it). I find that his complete and total destruction of Natasha Rostova as a person betrays his rampant misogyny (Chekhov parodied this in Dushechka, and Tolstoy responded by saying that he felt Dushechka portrayed a "perfect woman", completely missing the sarcasm).
I wonder how he was viewed under Lenin and then Stalin. I could see periods of praise followed by severe restriction due to how he expresses those ideas in his writings. Still need to read Resurrection sometime to experience post-kooky Tolstoy's writing. Interesting exchange between him and Chekhov (who I need to read in more than a handful of short stories).
As a result, when I hear "Tolstoy" I think "misogynistic crazy old man who thought he was better than everyone else, became a vocal vegetarian and helped contribute to a failed social experiment that had disastrous results for Russia and the world - oh, and he was a phenomenal writer".
Sounds like quite a few American writers from the mid-19th century in terms of weirdness, if not in actual writing talent.
For all that, his prose style is arguably one of the best of all the Russian writers. He is direct and clear and uses his words well. Pushkin is probably the only writer that is stylistically better. Aesthetically, I think there are several writers on a par with him and only a few that are better. Ideologically, however, he's down At the Bottom with Gorky.
I thought you'd have Soltzhenitsyn in there in terms of ideological ranking
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie
Je suis méchant.
Je suis méchant.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
- 21/02/2011 01:05:49 AM
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Some thoughts on the book
- 21/02/2011 02:49:33 AM
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Translation was by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1920s)
- 21/02/2011 03:11:25 AM
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Without knowing anything about the translation, it already sounds terrible.
- 21/02/2011 05:06:53 AM
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It's readable, provided you know so little of Russia and its court circles of the time
- 21/02/2011 05:34:56 AM
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Re: It's readable, provided you know so little of Russia and its court circles of the time
- 27/02/2011 01:04:50 AM
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I read it when I was 19 (Jesus Christ, that is almost 10 years ago)
- 21/02/2011 01:48:16 PM
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When I first visited wotmania, I was 25. I turn 37 in less than five months 
- 21/02/2011 06:40:07 PM
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- 21/02/2011 06:40:07 PM
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Hey ya know what I read the most unbelievable thing about Tolstoy the other day ...
- 22/02/2011 12:46:37 AM
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