War and Peace - translation comparison request

It was so helpful to see wcarter’s posting of pages of the new Pasternak Dr Zhivago translation alongside a previous translation a few days ago. (I was surprised to see I definitely favored the non-Pasternak one!)

Does anyone have more than one Folio version of War and Peace? I’d be interesting in seeing a similar comparison. Thanks in advance!

I do. It's the P&V translation. I'll post pics late if I have a chance, but you can find the beginning of it in various places online without much difficulty.

>1 ChampagneSVP:

I would STRONGLY recommend the Rosemary Edmonds FS translation. It's TERRIFIC and the P&V trnslation is a waste of time - of course, this is just my opinion.

>3 EclecticIndulgence:

I agree with your comment that "the P&V translation is a waste of time". When they first appeared the P&V translations were the flavour-du-jour and were widely praised for their literalness and faithfulness to the original language. What these reviewers forgot to tell you is that their English translations are convoluted, ungrammatical and unreadable. The P&V translations often make little sense and these translations are a classic case of "overlooking the forest for the trees". They may have translated the individual words accurately but in reassembling them they have created something unpleasant to read.

My personal preference is for the oldest English translation, the ones from Constance Garnett. Yes, they may have a bit of a late-19th century Victorian English feel to them, but they are beautifully written and they are models of clarity. There is ample reason the Constance Garnett Russian translations are still popular and widely read over one-hundred years later.

Completely agree about P & V translations being crummy. There was a wonderful article by David Remnick a while back titled "The Translation Wars" from the New Yorker, that covered this issue in depth. Here is the link for anyone interested:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars

>4 dlphcoracl:

Constance Garnett is also my go-to Russian translator, not due to availability (though, she's widely available), but due to the flow without superfluous modernity which loses author's original meaning. I'd be curious to know what others think of Edmonds, as I quite enjoyed her for W&P.

>3 EclecticIndulgence:
>4 dlphcoracl:
>5 Akes:
thank you all for the warning about the P&V. EI, what was it about Edmonds’ translation that was so enjoyable?

Am so glad it's not just me! P&V are absolutely atrocious. Their translation of Leskov's Selected Tales is unreadable - I defy anyone to get past page 20. I have never understood their popularity. Constance is far superior.

>8 Bibliogasm:

"I have never understood their popularity. Constance is far superior."

You are preaching to the choir.

I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned the Maudes. Wasn’t theirs the first English translation (and the one endorsed by Tolstoy himself)?

I have no personal insight as I haven’t read the Garnett translation myself, but I was warned off it years ago by someone who claimed it was at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from the P&V translation (ie. it was hideously bowdlerised and all the idiosyncrasies of the Russian original had been smoothed out into bland vanilla).

>10 plasticjock:

The problem with the Louise and Aylmer Maude translations is that they are restricted to the works of Leo Tolstoy. I cannot think of any other Russian authors the Maudes translated.

>11 dlphcoracl: Which, I suppose, is why I have 14 Russian novels by 5 different Russian authors with the Garnett translation and one by Louise and Aylmer Maude (War and Peace). I also have 5 Russian works, including the FS War and Peace, with the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. For War and Peace, I prefer the Maude.

>5 Akes: just read the New Yorker piece - interesting!
Thanks for that...

If I'm not mistaken however, Constance Garnett is known for skipping paragraphs which she could not understand, no? I've personally only read the Maudes' translation however, would like to hear everyone's opinion on the above.

Has anyone here read The Raw Youth (Garnett) / The Adolescent (P&V). I have both copies and I'm about to start. Any advice on which to go with?

Also, is it true that Garnett simply skipped sections she didn't understand or is this just an exaggeration? I have read many different translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and I have always enjoyed the flow of CG.

I like the Maude translation of War and Peace the best fwiw.

>16 d-b:

I know that Garnett is thought of very poorly by anyone who is vaguely fluent in both languages. She was among the first to translate these things, I suppose, and gets extra credit that way. But I don't think she's viewed as the best translator by nearly anyone as she tends to lose the voice of whatever writer she's working with. I think Nabokov said something about how Americans couldn't tell Tolstoy from Dostoevsky because they were reading Garnett's voice.

>15 d-b:
>17 Jason461:

I avoid all of the P&V translations after having read the P&V translation of Dostoevksy's 'Crime and Punishment'. Despite the failings of the Constance Garnett translations, i.e., she puts the great Russian novels into her late-Victorian blender, homogenizing the Russian language so that an English-speaking reader cannot appreciate the differences and nuances of the various Russian authors, they are always fluent and easily comprehensible. The same cannot be said of the P&V translations in which key paragraphs and pages are so poorly worded and convoluted in the English language that one needs a translator for the translation. The Garnett translations may not be ideal but the P&V translations are not a viable alternative.

P.S. Although the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of War and Peace is excellent, they did not (to my knowledge) translate any Russian author other than Leo Tolstoy.

>18 dlphcoracl:

We disagree. I prefer the P&V substantially to Garnett. It's also nice to know that I'm getting Russian lit and not Victorian British lit.

>19 Jason461:

That is why there are so many translations of classic works of literature. Rarely will one translation emerge as clearly superior and each reader will look for something different in his/her choice of translator. I knowingly sacrifice the unique rhythms and some element of authenticity for the fluidity and clarity of the Constance Garnett translations. For other readers this is an unacceptable compromise. The P&V translations may get the Russian words and rhythms correctly, but they reassemble them in an English language that is opaque and (for lack of a better word) "clunky". But that's what makes a market.

Thanks for the input!

Having read 50 pages of the P&V version I have now switched to Constance Garnett's victorian prose. I've read the P&V translations of Demons and Notes before, but couldn't get into their rendering of The Adolescent. Personally I also found the P&V translation too clunky. For some reason the P&V translations made the book 'un-rememberable' if that makes any sense. What I mean is I would read a few pages and would find I had read the text but hadn't taken anything in. Funny, as Demons is the only other big translation of theirs I have read and as I sit here typing I can't really recall the plot. On the other hand Crime, Brothers, The Idiot etc are all seared into my memory and I read them longer ago than Demons.

I understand how many would value the literalness of P&V and do understand that there is some merit in this. However, I prefer flow over overt literalness.

After reading a few pages side by side I haven't noticed anything glaringly different in sentence content within The Adolescent. I wonder how true the allegations against Garnett of omitting important parts of text really are? No one I have talked to has ever shown me an example that really matters - they just repeat it as fact, seemingly on the authority of Nabakov.

I don't pay much credence to Nabokov's quip against Garnett either. I love his own works but his overtly literal translation of Pushkin does not do it for me. Anyone else find this to be the case with his rendering of Eugene Onegin?

Also has anyone else read The Raw Youth/The Adolescent? It's not as popular as Dostoyevsky's other works but I'm really enjoying it so far.

>21 d-b:

" Personally I also found the P&V translation too clunky. For some reason the P&V translation made the book 'un-rememberable' if that makes any sense."

And that is precisely the point(s) I belabored in my posts above and, yes, it makes PERFECT sense. This was the same reading experience I had with the P&V translation of 'Crime and Punishment'. I would read several pages and not really comprehend where the story line was going nor did I fully comprehend Dostoevsky's philosophical points.

In essence, what P&V have done is get their translations "half-right". Volokhonsky accurately translates the Russian words and phrases into English words, perhaps more so than other translators such as Constance Garnett or the Maudes. However, Richard Pevear does not reassemble the individual words and phrases into a coherent, literate form of the English language and it is strikingly ungrammatical. Reading the P&V translation I thought I had suddenly acquired a form of dyslexia.

These problems disappear with the Constance Garnett translations. They may not be the utmost in fidelity to the Russian language or to the quirks and rhythms of Russian authors but (for me) that is a small price to pay for the clarity and fluidity of her translations. They are simply enjoyable to read.

I submit the following in case it is of use to anyone looking to jump into Russian literature.

But first, a disclaimer: I have yet to read any Russian literature and do not speak Russian at all. I have zero expertise and, even if I had some, would not purport to tell others how to satisfy their own tastes. I do plan to read some Russian literature and therefore put in some work to find out what translations I want once it is time to buy; here, I merely share what I turned up so that it might help others along in their search.

A bit about me and what I want as a reader, so you understand the criteria behind my statements: when it comes to the Russian works I want to read, they are considered classics, and I am reading them more to acquaint myself with a significant work in the closest English equivalent to its original form than to simply enjoy the reading (fidelity is far more important to me than readability or flow); if I come away from War And Peace (for example) knowing the work better than if I'd read another translation, but enjoying the reading less, I will have gotten what I wanted from the read and have no interest in any lesser translation that might've been "tarted up" to my tastes. I don't want to read the work of a translator who rendered works by different authors into a single Anglified style (as I'm told Constance Garnett has done), nor can I tolerate abridgments (in translations or in anything at all).

On to what I found (and again, I'm relying on the opinions and statements of those who have done the reading because I have not):

Because P&V (Pevear and Volokhonsky) are recent and widely used, much of my research focused on them. I've read that P&V are only ones to leave a giant sentence as long as it was and preserve Tolstoy's repetitions etc. - this, to me, is invaluable.

Here are some pro-P&V sources (not that you must read P&V, but before skipping them, you may as well hear the opposing case):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/11/22/tolstoys-real-hero/
https://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/defending-pevear-and-volokhonsk...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars (this one has lots to say about Garnett)

Here are some anti-P&V sources (likewise):
http://www.tolstoytherapy.com/2014/01/on-war-peace-my-problems-with-pevear.html
http://www.tolstoytherapy.com/2014/01/on-war-peace-my-problems-with-pevear_17.ht...
(in a note I took when I read these (months ago), I said "the P&V samples here are painful, but some experts say Tolstoy wrote some passages that way ("dead face" etc.)", and as I said before, if Tolstoy wrote some painful passages, I want the pain).
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hy...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (this one praises Garnett)
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature...

Of course there are choices other than P&V and Garnett, they are discussed in some of the above links, and more follows:

The Dunnigan translation of War And Peace has been called a "doctor's office version" written in "American English." I'm glad something like this (and the Garnetts) exists in order to get these works to people who might not otherwise read them, but this is definitely not something I'd consider.

Translations of Anna Karenina: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/new-translations-of-tolstoys-ann...

Re: the Bartlett translation of Anna Karenina: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-anna-karenina-rosamund-bar...

I hope this helps.

One other thing: I noticed that, among those discussing P&V in the various things I've read (not limited to the links above), those fluent in Russian tended to favor P&V. Of course, if you read other sources, you may get other results.

>21 d-b: Nabokov's Onegin is a travesty. Pet project gone ridiculously wrong. Like a toddler who, unable to figure out a toy, breaks it in frustration, Nabokov was too vain to admit to himself he was not up to the task and proceeded to produce an exceedingly ugly, puzzling and utterly useless translation. And it's not even literal in any sense of the word.

Let me copy/paste something I wrote about it in a post on the Fine Press forum:

"Nabokov was of an opinion that it's impossible to translate Pushkin well in a poetic form, so might as well give up on poetry and go for a literal translation. But the result is just puzzling. Incredibly ugly translation, and not even particularly faithful or nuanced in terms of meaning. Sometimes he translates simple common Russian words with rare/archaic/regional/fancy English words for no reason whatsoever - since he gave up on rhyming, meter, and stanza structure anyway; sometimes he simply picks wrong words as someone with poor knowledge of English would, and sometime he goes too literal, translating words individually, as if unaware that combined words don't mean the same in the other language, or that their order should be different, which reminds me of google translate. It's just hard to believe it's Nabokov."

The "google translate" aspect was actually picked up right at the publication, as Edmund Wilson wrote in his famous review that cost him friendship with Nabokov: "such passages sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English."

And I completely agree that Nabokov, while a fine writer himself, is the last person to go to for opinions on others. He sure talked a lot of crap about many a world-famous writer.

>24 St._Troy:

Yep - there is that. P&V is clunky in English but the phrases turn properly in Russian.

I grew up on translations (when you are from a small language, that is what happens to you). As I was getting better with English and Russian, I was getting also better at reading clunky translations into Bulgarian - my brain was assisting by serving me the Russian/English phrase hiding behind the translation. That is partially why some Russian speakers actually prefer P&V -- it allows you to see the phrase behind the phrase and see the connotations which get lost even in the best translations.

Translations are tricky... And when the cultures of the writer and the reader are very different, there is a very thin line and something always needs to give.

Garnett is good if you want to know what happens and you like Victorian novels. She is a really bad choice if you care about the author voice. P&V is clunky in English but you can hear the author voice behind it.

My advice in the cases where there are more than one translation always is to try to read a page or 2 from each and see what clicks for you. There will never be a perfect one - you just have different shades of problems.

>26 AnnieMod: "... some Russian speakers actually prefer P&V -- it allows you to see the phrase behind the phrase and see the connotations which get lost even in the best translations. . . . P&V is clunky in English but you can hear the author voice behind it."

That's the problem in a nutshell. You, with a good knowledge of Russian, can "hear the author voice behind it", while to someone with no Russian it just remains clunky English.

>27 boldface: I have no Russian and loved the P&V War and Peace. I've never read it in any other translation, however, so it's hard for me to say how much of that was their work :)

As someone who reads widely in the world, I've been following this discussion with interest. I read W&P in the FS Rosemary Edmonds translations. I enjoyed it and haven't felt the urge for a reread yet. If I did, I'd probably try another translation if I had one on hand. Because I do like to compare.

But one thing to note is that comparison is a luxury (for us single language readers) we only get because of the classic canonization of this work. We don't often get that luxury with other authors or (smaller) languages. Even with masterpieces, like Proust, we might have to wait a hundred years between translations. And I am really enjoying going through the new ones in my re-read.

The Three Percent website at University of Rochester puts it like this: "Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. That is why we have chosen the name Three Percent for this site. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%." So even in a major language like Russian, I'll probably not get to read another translation of the stunning The Eighth Life even if I'm curious about what Russian word and its English possibilities were considered before settling on "Generalissimus" as a nickname for Stalin. I'll likely never get another view into A Dream in Polar Fog, one of my favorites from the Russian. And another translation of Petals of Blood out of the Gikuyu? Forget about it. I'm happy to have the one I have...

I say if it is a work you love, seek out all the translations and read them all. You'll end up with a better understanding of the work, the author, and the biases, agendas, strengths, and weaknesses of the translators.

I do not read Russian, but do read Greek. I can see that doing literal word for word translations from Greek to English would be as clunky as P&V's Russian to English translations.

For what it's worth, my favourite 'War and Peace' translator is Anthony Briggs - even with his cockney geezer language for the lower classes! As for Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin', I did read James E. Falen's translation in the beautifully illustrated Folio edition, but prefer the Stanley Mitchell translation, in Penguin paperback.

>23 St._Troy: the P&V samples here are painful, but some experts say Tolstoy wrote some passages that way ("dead face" etc.)", and as I said before, if Tolstoy wrote some painful passages, I want the pain

Tolstoy surely did write "dead face", but it doesn't sound odd in Russian. And here lies a problem with literal translations of this kind - they are actually less faithful to the original. Simply translating word by word, like google translate, makes no sense. You don't gain anything, you just muddle the original. Tolstoy's language wasn't awkward, ugly, or painful. Fidelity vs readability/flow is a false dichotomy, I think - if you garbled up the flow and lost readability, you lost fidelity.

Translating is an art, it's never straight-forward and requires a great deal of adapting and true mastery of languages. If even simple expressions sometimes cannot be translated well literally, what do you do with metaphors, similes, word play, etc.? And the farther the relationship between the languages is, and the more creative/playful/masterful the original prose is (let alone poetry), the farther you have to get away from literalness if you want to remain true to the original. On the other hand, it's also very easy to stray and replace author's voice with your own...

P.S. I can't really say anything on the P&V vs Garnett issue, as I haven't seen even samples of either. Just wanted to say that "dead face" in itself is not a painful choice of words in Russian, so translation shouldn't be painful either.

Btw, what about the Maudes? Again, I haven't read any of their translations so can't offer an opinion, but they sound at least worthy of some research. I don't know if it's true that Garnett sometimes had troubles understanding Russian, but I'm sure the Maudes wouldn't have such problems. Aylmer came from Britain to Russia to study when he was around 16 and stayed on for over 20 years. There he met and married Louise, a daughter of a British merchant based in Moscow. She was born and raised in Russia. They had common acquaintances with Tolstoy and eventually became friends. Their translations got his stamp of approval, and their quest to publish complete translated works of Tolstoy was supported by George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and other notable British literary figures. If I were looking for a Tolstoy translation, I would at least look into the Maudes.