The Maudes both spent long years living in Moscow and spoke flawless Russian. Her translation of War and Peace is ultimately a little too Edwardian, and lacks precision. She brought an admirable educated and literary sensibility to her translations, but was largely self-taught, and worked without the arsenal of dictionaries and resources available in abundance today, not to mention the benefit of hindsight. Garnett, who published her translation in 1904, worked while Tolstoy was still alive, and even went to Russia to meet the author at his home. There are many reasons why the translations by Constance Garnett and the Maudes have stood the test of time, and are now regarded as classics in their own right. The vivid translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Vintage Classics in 2007, is even more faithful to Tolstoy’s idiosyncracies, but the resulting English prose can be highly un-idiomatic and thus somehow falls short of the majesty of the original. The new Penguin Classics edition by Anthony Briggs, published in 2005, breathes new life into War and Peace, but not all have warmed to its contemporary colloquialisms and British idioms. To a certain extent, this is also true of the two most recent translations, both of which aim for a more accurate rendition of Tolstoy’s singular literary style. Neither, however, eclipsed the celebrated versions produced by Constance Garnett, and by the husband and wife team of Louise and Aylmer Maude, published earlier in the century. Two respected new translations made War and Peace widely available in paperback in the second half of the twentieth century, one by the British translator Rosemary Edmonds for Penguin Classics in 1957, and the other by the American Ann Dunnigan for Signet Classics in 1968. In fact, about a dozen translations have appeared since the novel’s first complete publication in Russian in 1869, but only a handful stand out. Which translation of War and Peace should I read?īy Rosamund Bartlett, translator and author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life.Īs with most of the Russian classics, there are several translations of Tolstoy’s immortal War and Peace for the anglophone reader to choose from. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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