War and Peace is like the trunk of one of Leo Tolstoy’s
beloved oaks, fed by invisible roots and producing numerous
branches that keep on spreading.
Among the hidden feeders were the fair copies produced by his
wife Sonya, who every night would transcribe her husband’s daily
scribblings; in the morning Tolstoy would seize on the pile of new
pages, cross out most of their contents, give characters different
names, move whole passages around, change plot-lines, and leave
another pile of illegible scrawls for Sonya to recopy the next
night - after she had checked the servants, supplies and accounts,
fed the baby and put the older children to bed.
Ilyusha, their second son, calculated that his mother’s
transcriptions would add to up seven complete copies of the
1000-page novel.
The tree’s many branches include several well-known English
translations, starting in 1904 with the pioneering work of
Constance Garnett, who gave us a wonderfully ladylike version of
the over-the-top Russian. Rosemary Edmonds ruled the Penguin roost
for many years, revising her 1957 version in 1978.
Two more appeared this century; notable was Andrew Bromfield’s
2006 translation of a shorter War and Peace, sometimes
mistaken for an abridgement. In fact this was the earliest draft of
the epic novel, innocent of the many additions that Tolstoy
incorporated every time he revised it, and meticulously pieced
together over 50 years by a researcher at the Tolstoy Museum House
in Moscow.
Containing “more peace and less war”, it was printed by the
Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1983, and also by a private publisher
at his own expense in February 2000.
Then, in 2007, along came the husband and wife team of Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who without lifting a finger
fulfilled the latest stipulation for all translation. According to
the professionals, there should be two people working on every
text, one a native speaker of the target language, and the other of
the original.
A furniture maker in New York married to a Russian emigre,
Pevear had previously worked in French, Italian and Spanish, but
knew no Russian. Volokhonsky, born in Leningrad, had studied
English in her hometown. Between them they decided to have a bash
at Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov after Volokhonsky ,
looking over her husband’s shoulder as he read David Magarshack’s
translation, kept finding fault with it. They decided to test
“their” method on three chapters: 1) Volokhonsky makes a strictly
literary translation with copious notes; 2) Pevear puts it into
good English, constantly consulting Pevear as to accuracy; and 3)
he reads his final version aloud while she follows the Russian
text.
Despite this brilliant methodology, the three sample chapters
were rejected by both Random House and Oxford University Press.
Highly praised by academics Pevear personally contacted, they
nevertheless found favour with only one small publisher, who
offered the couple $US1000 for the full job. When they pointed out
that this could take up to five years, he upped the offer to
$US6000. Fortunately, they also got a substantial government grant,
and after the translation was published, to great acclaim, in 1990,
were able to devote themselves to 15 more classics of Russian
literature.
Their Anna Karenina, first published by Penguin in
2000, received a huge boost four years later when Oprah Winfrey
chose it for her Book of the Month Club. Sales soared. (There was
even a spin-off for this reviewer. Trying to access my emails in an
Italian internet cafe, I almost deleted some “spam” from an unknown
“Harpo” in the US. It was in fact a commission to contribute an
article on the subject “Anna Karenina and Adultery” to the
Book-club website. Harpo - Oprah spelt backwards, dummy - is the
name of the Winfrey production company.)
Pevear-Volokhonsky (hereinafter P-V) are essentially guided by
fidelity to the original language, understood in the broadest
sense. For example: a great many of the conversations in War
and Peace are conducted in French, reflecting the aspirations
of the Russian nobility, but a custom Tolstoy personally
disapproved of.
Several translators have put these into English along with the
Russian, thus eliding the snobbery the French is designed to
express. P-V follow Tolstoy by providing footnote translations of
the French passages.
Now in their 60s and living in France because it is cheaper, the
couple have observed that when people speak they often stumble and
mix their metaphors. Translators usually correct characters who do
the same, but “We don’t”. Most translators also try to smooth out
Tolstoy’s own idiosyncratic, plain-speaking language, in which he
doesn’t care how often he repeats a word if he really wants to make
a point or delineate a character (Napoleon’s effete “small white
hands”; “the little princess with the short upper lip”, an
instantly recognisable feature borrowed from his cousin’s
wife).
Orlando Figes has pointed out that in a paragraph where Tolstoy
uses the past tense of the verb plakat, to weep, seven times,
earlier translators have been unable to refrain from varying it
with “cried” or “broke into tears’. The P-Vs are made of sterner
stuff.
I had always been suspicious of the anglicisation of the speech
defect of Nikolai’s army friend Major Denisov. Sure, he is unable
to pronounce his “r”s, but should he say “wabbit” for “rabbit”,
when the Russian suggests a more guttural sound? P-V’s solutions is
“ghr”, as in “the Ghrat”, the nickname of a disliked officer. It
may not trip off the tongue like “Wat”, but it does avoid
out-of-character foppishness.
The new translation has been extravagantly praised, as it
thoroughly deserves, but even granting its superiority, will it
sell enough copies? (If that is what counts these days.) The whole
P-V body of work is doing quite nicely thank you, so well in fact
that this War and Peace is sold at an amazingly low price.
A splendidly handsome hardback with fine pages and clear print, it
is a joy in every way. And that includes Tolstoy’s story.
Judith Armstrong, author of The Unsaid Anna Karenina
(Macmillan, 1988), is writing a novel based on the life of Sonya
Tolstoy.
