One of the things that surprised me when I started reading War and Peace in Russian was that it wasn’t particularly well written in the “fine writing,” Nabokovian sense. The sentences were baggy, the words were not carefully harmonized, and there was an astonishing amount of repetition. But le style, c’est l’homme, and Tolstoy himself was baggy and unharmonized, and I was soon as caught up in the story as I had been when I read it in English.

Here’s a little from what he had to say about the translation:

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation gives us new access to the spirit and order of the book. Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both. Though Tolstoy has been well served in English, his translators, like Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds, and Aylmer and Louise Maude, have tended to be somewhat activist, sidestepping difficult words, smoothing the rhythm of the Russian, and eliminating one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive elements, repetition. Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are justly celebrated for their translations of Dostoyevsky, are closer to the originalist camp than to the activist. Without being Nabokovians (Nabokov used such clanking words as “mollitude” in his outlandishly literal translation of “Eugene Onegin,” and insisted on calling Stiva Oblonsky, in “Anna Karenina,” “Steve”), they want the English to sound as close to the Russian as possible, and they are fervent about the importance of “roughening up” their versions when the Russian demands it. Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages.

And here’s my favorite bit from the review:

Perhaps Tolstoy really didn’t know where to start or end. He had originally wanted to write about 1856, and a patrician revolutionary’s return to Russian life from long Siberian exile. He himself had bitter experience of the mood of futility that characterized the years just after the pointless blundering of the Crimean War. He had fought in the Crimea, had witnessed the bloody suttee of that campaign, where men willingly sacrificed themselves on the national pyre, and for nothing. His “Sebastopol Sketches” lucidly described the opacities of war. In order to write well about 1856, however, he felt that he needed to go back to 1825, when the upper-class rebels known as the Decembrists were executed and exiled. But 1825 could not be evoked, Tolstoy explained in a note, without the great year 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow for four weeks. And 1812 would need 1805 as preparation, which is when the novel opens.

Is it me, or is Ecco’s ‘original edition’ fading further into the distance with every passing week, as more and more attention is lavished on the Pevear & Volokhonsky edition?

Currently two publishers are feuding over rival editions of a book that was published—well, the publication date is one of the things they’re feuding about. Last month Ecco Press brought out a much shorter version of Tolstoy’s masterpiece about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, translated by Andrew Bromfield. This edition constitutes Tolstoy’s first attempt at the novel, which he published in 1866 in a Russian literary magazine. Tolstoy would spend another three years revising and enlarging his initial vision, ultimately producing the much longer novel familiar to modern readers. That is the version being published this month by Knopf and newly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the couple whose earlier translation of “Anna Karenina” became a best seller when Oprah Winfrey picked it as one of her book-club titles in 2004.

In the months leading up to publication, the two publishers took a few potshots at each other, with Knopf editor LuAnn Walther accusing Ecco of making “a serious mistake.” Walther even asked Pevear to draft a response to the Ecco version. Lately both houses have scaled back the rhetoric. Daniel Halpern, Ecco’s publisher, settled for saying in a recent interview that “anything that gets Tolstoy into the headlines has to be viewed as good news.” Walther refuses to comment further on the fracas. “It’s time to let the critics decide,” she says. But she does address what is perhaps a more pertinent question for the general reader: why does the world need yet another translation of “War and Peace,” and why now? “Because,” she says after a long pause, “it’s the greatest book ever written, and it’s never been done like this before. Because all the previous translations left things out and got things wrong. Because it is a great moment to be reading Tolstoy, because we’re at war. And because Richard and Larissa were willing to do it.”