War And Peace

[poliphilo]

I read War and Peace in my teens and loved it, revisited it in middle-age but wasn't in the mood and abandoned it part way through the first battle- and now- in what I think I can be allowed to call old age I'm loving it again. I can't understand why it has the reputation of being difficult when Tolstoy's prose is plain and uncomplicated, his characters as alive as any in fiction and his world view much closer to our own than, say, Jane Austen's. Yes, War and Peace is long- but not nearly as long as Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or Hilary Mantell's Cromwell trilogy or any of those other enormous modern epics that people seem to have to problems with. Perhaps it's just the Russian names...

I'm reading it in the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude. There are others- but Louise and Aylmer were not only Tolstoy's (younger) contemporaries but actually his friends- and in a position to consult him and ask his advice on knotty points. It's the only English language version that- so far as I'm aware- Tolstoy himself approved. It reads easily- and really, what more can you want?

Comments

[cmcmck]

A translation that reads easily is a good translation.

I can only manage two languages other than my own in the original (unless you count things like Old Norse or Old and Middle English) and the original is always always preferable.

[poliphilo]

I can manage short texts in French but that's all. I'm never going to read A La Recherche de Temps Perdu in the original

[cmcmck]

I did read it years back. I also manage Italian.

Something like Henri Vincenot's work which is in Dijonais dialect just doesn't translate.

[poliphilo]

I wonder how translators cope James Joyce's polyglot wordplay....