War & Peace all the time

I know, I know. We’re always on about this War and Peace thing, but in the upcoming New Yorker James Wood writes one of the best reviews of War and Peace I’ve read from the batch that have followed the latest translations. It’s the good kind of review; the kind that makes you want to pick up the book again.

Here’s a little from what he had to say about the translation:

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation gives us new access to the spirit and order of the book. Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both. Though Tolstoy has been well served in English, his translators, like Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds, and Aylmer and Louise Maude, have tended to be somewhat activist, sidestepping difficult words, smoothing the rhythm of the Russian, and eliminating one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive elements, repetition. Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are justly celebrated for their translations of Dostoyevsky, are closer to the originalist camp than to the activist. Without being Nabokovians (Nabokov used such clanking words as “mollitude” in his outlandishly literal translation of “Eugene Onegin,” and insisted on calling Stiva Oblonsky, in “Anna Karenina,” “Steve”), they want the English to sound as close to the Russian as possible, and they are fervent about the importance of “roughening up” their versions when the Russian demands it. Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages.

And here’s my favorite bit from the review:

Perhaps Tolstoy really didn’t know where to start or end. He had originally wanted to write about 1856, and a patrician revolutionary’s return to Russian life from long Siberian exile. He himself had bitter experience of the mood of futility that characterized the years just after the pointless blundering of the Crimean War. He had fought in the Crimea, had witnessed the bloody suttee of that campaign, where men willingly sacrificed themselves on the national pyre, and for nothing. His “Sebastopol Sketches” lucidly described the opacities of war. In order to write well about 1856, however, he felt that he needed to go back to 1825, when the upper-class rebels known as the Decembrists were executed and exiled. But 1825 could not be evoked, Tolstoy explained in a note, without the great year 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow for four weeks. And 1812 would need 1805 as preparation, which is when the novel opens.

Is it me, or is Ecco’s ‘original edition’ fading further into the distance with every passing week, as more and more attention is lavished on the Pevear & Volokhonsky edition?