168th of 2nd 365: A choice. Which translation to continue reading?
I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace when I was 20. I’m 44 now and decided to reread it. This coincided with a new translation. Tolstoy first published War and Peace in whole in 1869 and Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation was first published in 1923. Tolstoy said of them “Better translators, both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented.” I loved the book but was eager to see if it was as exciting a book for middle-aged me as it was for young me.
The new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky received critical acclaim. Professor Vladimir Alexandrov from Yale reworked Tolstoy’s praise when he said of the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation “It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded.”
I don’t read Russian so I cannot compare their fidelity, but I know which of these two fragments is clumsy, and which is elegant:
The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life.
or
His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew’s life. Though externally he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a new life.
I'm swapping back to the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation (the latter quote).
168th of 2nd 365: A choice. Which translation to continue reading?
I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace when I was 20. I’m 44 now and decided to reread it. This coincided with a new translation. Tolstoy first published War and Peace in whole in 1869 and Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation was first published in 1923. Tolstoy said of them “Better translators, both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented.” I loved the book but was eager to see if it was as exciting a book for middle-aged me as it was for young me.
The new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky received critical acclaim. Professor Vladimir Alexandrov from Yale reworked Tolstoy’s praise when he said of the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation “It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded.”
I don’t read Russian so I cannot compare their fidelity, but I know which of these two fragments is clumsy, and which is elegant:
The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life.
or
His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew’s life. Though externally he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a new life.
I'm swapping back to the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation (the latter quote).