War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leo TolstoyTranslator: Richard Pevear
Translator: Larissa Volokhonsky
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2007-10-16
ISBN: 0307266931
Number of pages: 1296
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of War and Peace
Book Review: 5 stars for War & Peace, 2 stars for the translation
Summary: 5 Stars
Critics are praising this new edition of War and Peace as the greatest English translation to date (see, for example, New York Review of Books, Washington Post etc.).
I respectfully disagree.
Other Amazon reviewers, who have more common sense than the professional critics I've read, have pointed out the difficulty in reading the English translations from the French, which are deposited in small print at the bottom of each page. They are right. Because nearly 20% of the novel is in French, be prepared for an extremely disruptive reading experience switching back and forth from the text to the footnotes.
Basically, readers are forced to the footnotes simply so that the translators can say that they maintained authenticity to Tolstoy's original by inclusion of the French in the text. But the translators have ignored the fact that Tolstoy's novel was written for people who could read Russian and French! How many people who buy an English edition of War & Peace today also read French?
The location of the translations from the French is not the only problem. Tolstoy's often gnarly sentence structure is also maintained - what made sense in 19th century Russian does not necessarily make sense in 21st century English. Now every translator's challenge is to be as faithful as possible to the original vernacular while rendering the work being translated into a comprehensible form. In this case, I cannot speak to the translators' faithfulness to the original because I don't read Russian, but I can say that I had difficulty understanding many sentences which I found myself having to read two or more times.
My advice to first time readers of War and Peace is to buy the Penguin edition which was very capably translated by Rosemary Edmonds. There are many people who swear by the Garnett translation (Modern Library), however, I find it somewhat dated. There are many turns of phrase that seem a little archaic and the whole approach seems a bit cold compared to Edmonds. I also found that the characters seem much more alive and warm-hearted in Edmonds compared to Garnett - word choices and sentence structure are crucial in this respect.
In summary, every serious reader should take on War and Peace, but don't start with this new translation.
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