Overview
From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Leo Tolstoy’s master epic.War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds —peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers— as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving —and human— figures in world literature.
Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy’s style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose. With stunning grace and precision, this new version of War and Peace is set to become the definitive English edition.
An essay on translating WAR AND PEACE by Richard Pevear
To many prospective readers Tolstoy's War and Peace is the most intimidating of literary monuments. It is there, like a vast, unexplored continent, and all sorts of daunting rumors circulate about life in the interior. But once you cross the border, you discover that the world of War and Peace is more familiar and at the same time more surprising than the rumors suggested. That is as true for the translator as it is for the first-time reader.
We spent three years working full-time on the translation, revising it, copy-editing it, proofreading it twice, meaning that each of us read the novel some five times in Russian and in English. Yet even in my final checking of the proofs, I still found myself delighting, laughing, or holding back my tears as I read. An example of this last is the moment near the end when Pierre and Natasha, after all the harrowing experiences they've lived through, finally meet again in Princess Marya's drawing room. Pierre sees that Princess Marya has someone with her, but doesn't realize who it is. Princess Marya is perplexed.
She again shifted her gaze from Pierre's face to the face of the lady in the black dress and said:
"Don't you recognize her?"
Pierre glanced once more at the pale, fine face of the companion, with its dark eyes and strange mouth. Something dear, long forgotten, and more than sweet looked at him from those attentive eyes.
"But no, it can't be," he thought. "This stern, thin, pale, aged face? It can't be her. It's only a reminiscence of that one." But just then Princess Marya said: "Natasha." And the face, with its attentive eyes, with difficulty, with effort, like a rusty door opening – smiled, and from that open door there suddenly breathed and poured out upon Pierre that long-forgotten happiness of which, especially now, he was not even thinking. It breathed out, enveloped, and swallowed him whole. When she smiled, there could no longer be any doubt: it was Natasha, and he loved her.
What makes this passage so moving is not only the drama of the moment itself, but the way Tolstoy has sensed it and captured it in words. It can't be paraphrased; the translator has to follow as closely as possible the exact sequence and pacing of the words in order to catch the "musical" meaning of the original, which is less apparent than the "literal" meaning, but alone creates the impression Tolstoy intended.
I've said "translator," and in a sense our collaboration is so close that the two of us make up one translator who has the luck to be a native speaker of two languages. That situation has its advantages. Translators are always in danger of drifting into the sort of language that is commonly referred to as "smooth," "natural," or, as they now say, "reader friendly," and is really only a tissue of ready-made phrases. When that happens to me, as it sometimes does, Larissa is there to stop me. Where I have my say is in judging the quality of our English text, that is, in drawing the line between a literal and a faithful rendering, which are not at all the same. If the translation does not finally "work" in English, it doesn't work at all.
I'll take an example of what that collaboration can produce from Tolstoy's description of the Russian army crossing the river Enns. After a good deal of confusion, the hussar captain Denisov finally manages to clear the infantry from the bridge and send his cavalry over. As the first riders move onto the bridge, Tolstoy writes: "On the planks of the bridge the transparent sounds of hoofs rang out . . ." The Russian is unmistakable—prozrachnye zvuki "transparent sounds"—and I find its precision breathtaking. It is pure Tolstoy. To my knowledge, it has never been translated into English. What we find in other versions is the "thud" or "clang" of hoofs, and it is likely that I would have done something similar if Larissa had not brought me back to what Tolstoy actually wrote. His prose is full of such moments. Coming upon them and finding words for them in English has been one of the most rewarding aspects of our work.
Here is a very different and rather amusing example of the search for fidelity. Count Ilya Andreich Rostov, Natasha's father, is giving a banquet in honor of General Bagration. Ordering the menu, he insists that "grebeshki" be put in the "tortue." I assumed that tortue was French turtle soup, but what about grebeshki? The Russian word can mean either "cock's-combs" or "scallops." Which would you put in a turtle soup? I did research into the uses of cock's-combs, but with rather unappealing results. I looked at previous translations: one has "scallops" and thinks the soup is a "pie crust"; another has "cock's-combs" but in a "pasty"; in a third the "cock's-combs" are in a "soup"; the fourth agrees about the soup, but puts "croutons" in it.
Going by my own taste, I decided to put scallops in the turtle soup. This reading got as far as the first set of page proofs. Just then we met by chance (at a dinner in Paris) a woman who used to run a cooking school. We asked her which it should be. She, too, was puzzled. A few days later we received a long email from her. She had become so intrigued by our question that she went to the French National Library the next day and looked up the history of the culinary use of cock's-combs. She was happy to inform us that they came into fashion precisely around the time of the Napoleonic wars and were a key ingredient in turtle sauce. Suddenly the whole passage made sense, because the chef replies to the old count's order: "Three cold sauces, then?" The other translations have "three cold dishes" or "entrees," with no relation to sauces at all. Thanks to Mme. Meunier, we were able to make the correction in the second set of proofs.
But does such a small thing really matter? Well, it certaintly did to Tolstoy. What this seemingly trivial detail reveals is the extraordinary accuracy of his memory, even in the smallest things. Cock's-combs had gone out of fashion by his time, but he knew where to place them and in what.
Tolstoy's prose is a rich, fluid, multivoiced artistic medium. There is, for instance, a war between the French and Russian languages in War and Peace that mirrors the war between the French and Russian armies. His play with French and with gallicized Russian is a major element of social satire in the novel's composition, allowing him the sort of linguistic infiltrations later found in Joyce and Nabokov. This adds a verbal dimension to War and Peace that English readers don't suspect is there, because previous English translations have eliminated it. But this precocious modernism is never word play for its own sake. It is always moved by passion.
The world of War and Peace envelops you. It is full of uncertainties, surprises, constantly shifting perspectives, but once you enter it you feel that you're in sure hands. Over it all is that "infinite sky" that Prince Andrei discovers as he lies wounded on the field of Austerlitz. This vast unity that embraces the greatest diversity is the secret, the mystery, of Tolstoy's art. It presents a great challenge to its translators, as I've tried to suggest in a small way.
Editorials
Michael Dirda
…a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts. Stressing that their War and Peace sticks more closely to the Russian text than any other, including Louise and Aylmer Maude's semi-canonical 1923 version, Pevear and Volokhonsky retain the considerable amount of French used by Tolstoy's counts and princesses, preserve the author's penchant for word repetition and aim to match his tidy syntactic conciseness. The result certainly reads smoothly, its English being neither egregiously contemporary nor inappropriately old-fashioned. In this respect, the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace joins company with recent translations of The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote and In Search of Lost Time, these being among the few works of classic fiction equal to Tolstoy's in scope and richness.—The Washington Post
The Barnes & Noble Review
We might as well face it at the outset -- War and Peace is a big book. In length, obviously: nearly 1,250 pages in this translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. That makes it heavy to lug around, and when I read it in bed it left a dent in my sternum. And it requires a big commitment: unless you took the same speed reading course Woody Allen did (he read it in 20 minutes and reported: "It involved Russia"), it takes a big chunk out of your life to read. It's big in ambition, too: there's Tolstoy's, of course -- it took him more than ten years to write, research, and rewrite -- but closer to home, there's yours, if this is a mission you choose to accept. Reading War and Peace -- or being seen to do so -- is a sign that you are a Serious-to-the-Verge-of-Pretentious Person. The few times when I was caught reading it in public I felt sheepish.I'm not trying to be flippant. Since reading War and Peace over the summer, I've come to think that everything important one takes away from it is due to its size. Because Tolstoy deals with world-historical events like Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the book could feel like potted history. But Tolstoy cannily uses the vast space at his disposal to make the experience of reading about these bygone battles and people both real and made-up seem rounded and authentic. At one end of the scale, he periodically stops the flow of time and action to contemplate lots of stuff that doesn't fit in a narrative sequence: the presumptuousness of human ambition, the limitations of our ability to analyze the reasons why things happen as they do, the differing roles of the historian and the novelist.
At the other end of the scale, Tolstoy positively luxuriates in small moments, lounging about in details that a tough-minded editor would cut on grounds of space and yet which stay in my mind far longer than abstractions, no matter how profound. There's an exhilarating moment when Denisov, a short hussar with a speech impediment whom none of the women ever takes seriously, moves to the floor to dance the mazurka: "On the downbeat, he gave his lady a victorious and jocular sidelong look, unexpectedly stamped his foot [and] bounced off the floor springily.... [S]preading his legs, he stopped on his heels, paused like that for a second, tapped his feet in place with a clanking of spurs, spun quickly, then, tapping his right ankle with his left foot, again flew along in a circle." There's the old nanny Anna Makarovna, who has a trick that never fails to thrill the children (and me): "[B]y a secret known only to herself, Anna Makarovna knitted [two stockings] at once on her needles, and which she always drew triumphantly one out of the other before the children, when the stockings were finished." (By the way, there's video online of knitters who can perform Anna Makarovna's trick -- and a lot of them quote Tolstoy.) These are moments when a private piece of a person's character flashes out; Tolstoy grants us the ability to glimpse and understand these moments intimately, but how many times in life have we seen such moments and missed them?
Tolstoy has us enter his imposing edifice through a frippery occasion, although the hostess, Anna Pavlovna, wouldn't thank us for saying so. She has carved out a niche in political soirées where everybody speaks the best French. Tolstoy likens her to a factory owner who keeps the spindles and wheels running smoothly. Why begin here? Well, for one thing, we get a glimpse of the people inhabiting the corridors of power in Russia, with public grandstanding and private influence peddling, and we also experience for ourselves the shiny banality of their faces, clothes, smiles, and conversation. For another, we meet the two main male characters, neither of whom fits comfortably into this world. The aristocratic newlywed Prince Andrei ought to, and yet he holds himself sardonically aloof, even from his cute little pet of a wife. Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a dying count, is a bit more of an outsider, newly arrived from Paris and eager to enter into the swing of things. He is merely inadvertently awkward.
Life is so messy and disorganized -- or, conversely, so structured by outside forces -- that it's hard to know which man has adopted the better strategy for coping. Neither, though, is happy with his choice; both come up against a moment that seems to call them imperiously to some more authentic way of living. I think of Rilke, faced with an implacable ancient torso of Apollo: "You must change your life." Easier said than done. Tolstoy's Napoleon hasn't an inkling of that kind of heroism. And how to persuade us of its possibility, let alone accomplishment, in fiction?
I come back to size. Ever since high school English, I've distrusted short stories with that moment of epiphany that's supposed to betoken a cataclysmic change of heart. Even the most skilful -- Joyce's "The Dead," say, or Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" -- don't really manage to overcome my suspicion that the life that will continue after the story stops wouldn't really turn out to be all that different. Give me a good couple hundred pages at least to see how someone can muster the will over the long haul to change his life. Tolstoy gives us plenty more than that, allowing his characters the room they need to develop in credible ways.
War and Peace covers a long span of time -- about 15 years all told. And precisely because it can seem to take almost as long to read, whatever change characters undergo -- or choose -- feels real. Take Natasha: to my mind charming even when infuriating, she starts as an ardent 13 and ends a very different figure at 27 -- but that's such a stage of flux that it's not surprising. (I can't resist quoting: "She valued the society of the people to whom, disheveled, in a dressing gown, she could come striding out of the nursery with a joyful face and show a diaper with a yellow instead of a green stain, and hear comforting words that the baby was now much better.") Lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, the initially cynical Prince Andrei has a vision of the eternal that alters everything about his life -- but precisely because it's so far out of everyday experience he cannot express it to anyone. Tolstoy, however, opens Andrei's heart to us in a way that makes what is inexpressible entirely believable. And then there is Pierre. He begins as an overgrown frat boy, bumbles into a spiritual conversion, hatches a ludicrous plan to alter the course of history...what a mess! He's also fat and conversationally a bit odd, which makes it all the harder for a lot of people in and out of the novel to take him seriously. And yet by the end, we see him become magnanimous, even wise. How has this come to be?
Pierre is (if I were forced to choose) my favorite character, and the constant effort of his inner self's unfolding -- seeking, striving, losing its way, giving up, regrouping -- is for me the most compelling plot line. Through a typically human combination of ill-informed choice and accident, Pierre becomes a common prisoner of war when the French reach Moscow. But something odd happens when he shares a life of imprisonment with ordinary foot soldiers: "The very qualities which, in the world he formerly lived in, were, if not harmful, at least a hindrance to him -- his strength, his scorn of life's comforts, his absentmindedness, his simplicity -- here, among these people, gave him almost the status of a hero. And Pierre felt that this view obliged him." Are we here witnessing in Pierre, about one thousand pages in, a real understanding of what humans owe each other, a true conversion? Maybe so -- but it doesn't mean there aren't a few slips, follies, and downright failures in his future. And that feels authentic, too.
I've read War and Peace once before, at 21, and vividly remember holding forth in class about it. It was chastening this summer to discover that I'd forgotten almost everything about the novel except that it involved Russia. Fortunately, the bits I did remember -- the Battle of Austerlitz, the scenes from family life at the end -- were still compelling. There were many times in the past few months when Tolstoy's world became my world. Sometimes I'd just slip in for a little visit -- reading a chapter or two (almost all are conveniently short) standing by the stove while waiting for the coffee water to boil or sitting in the car in the interstices of suburban-mother carpooling. At night I would fall into it for chapters at a time, and snatches of Tolstoy would roll about my head during the day, such as the memory of Andrei falling in love despite himself: " 'And what makes her happy?' Prince Andrei asked himself with involuntary curiosity." Or the bedtime prayer of Platon, a peasant whose life seems to have no discernable shape: "So there, Lord, lay me down like a stone, raise me up like a loaf." I hope never to witness a wolf hunt or a mob baying for the blood of a scapegoat, but there's been time for them, too, in Tolstoy's vast narrative expanse.
The novel is so long there's even time to be bored every now and then. I say this, by the way, as a compliment. "Bored" might be the wrong word; what I mean to describe are moments when nothing much to my mind is happening, or nobody I like is talking. My longueurs are probably not yours. But such moments are part of life, too, and have their own lessons. Long novels, I find, teach me patience with characters and ideas that would be easy to turn away from in life (and short fiction). Natasha's younger brother Petya may dream of the tsar, Mother Russia, and glory in battle in ways I don't find congenial, and yet I feel more tender toward what I see as his foolish gallantry than I might have if I had not encountered them in the context of Tolstoy's enormous canvas. I also have Petya to thank for the hypersensitive description of nocturnal waiting for the dawn of battle, just as memorable as Henry V walking the fields incognito the night before Agincourt: "Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored."
So the short version is: I loved my summer of War and Peace and am grateful for the translation that inspired me to read the novel again. I don't know any Russian, but I have read a number of other translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky -- most memorably, for me, their Brothers Karamazov, which was an absolute revelation. It was like a brilliantly cleaned painting, bringing out thrilling touches, caustic details, and even grimly funny highlights that just hadn't appeared to nonexperts before. This Tolstoy translation doesn't sound at all like the other ones of theirs I've read, but then, of course it's a different book. At first, I found the language stilted and artificial; it made the party scenes and military planning meetings that open the book slightly slow-going for me. And yet isn't that part of the point? I quite like the decision they made about the French conversations in the original. They leave them untranslated in the text (which means you can tell when characters are speaking in French and speculate about why they might be doing so), but they render them in English in notes at the bottom of the page. Pevear and Volokhonsky also have scads of historical and explanatory commentary tucked in the back, which I mostly ignored in the full flood of reading but which made a kind of fun self-quiz when I'd finished.
For anyone who still hasn't had enough of War and Peace, there's another translation newly available -- this one of Tolstoy's first version of the novel. When it reappeared in Russia a few years ago, the publisher pushed it as "half the usual length, less war and more peace, no philosophical digressions." Tolstoy had apparently thought of calling it All's Well That Ends Well. You'd be quite correct to think that it's a rather different book from the one he went on to write. Andrew Bromfield, the English translator, gamely tries to make the case that even first-time readers of the novel will enjoy it, but since most of his descriptions of what's truly interesting about the book lie in comparing the two versions, it makes more sense to read the famous longer one first. And as if all this weren't enough, I've been intrigued by the unabridged audiobook Naxos puts out -- 70 hours over a span of 51 CDs. It sounds like a big project for all concerned, but summer will be here before I know it. --Alexandra Mullen
Alexandra Mullen left a life as an academic in Victorian literature to return to her roots as a general reader. She now writes for The Hudson Review (where she is also an Advisory Editor), The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal.