War and Peace

readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/the-art-of-translation/#comment-206
languagehat.com/the-translation-wars/
languagehat.com/more-translation-wars/
nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/
languagehat.com/janet-malcolm-vs-pv/
kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/why-i-dont-read-pevear-and-volokhonsky-vtranslations/
firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hype-machine-and-how-it-could-have-been-stopped-or-at-least-slowed-down/

more articles tearing P&V to fucking shreds

the first article I posted (in my previous post) actually goes on to praise Garnett of all translations (which has only been disparaged by Nabokov, P&V, and people who don't know russian)
the Maude and Corrected Garnett translations are great for W&P and AK

> lists a bunch of articles from super obscure websites

lulz thanks, user. I'm Russian, faggot. P and V is best

You posted a comment on a blog from the NY times as a source for why P&V is bad lol get fucked idiot such convincing

It’s bad because the wife translates the sentence and then the husband “beautifies” them by changing up the sentence structure however the fuck he feels like even though he doesn’t fucking speak Russian

Read the Maud Peace and the Magarshack Anna. Loved both.

It's the second greatest novel. You're in for a treat no matter the translation

>w-w-why d-did you p-post all that e-evidence that I'm wr-wrong? i-is it b-because y-you're c-c-COMPENSATING f-for how wr-wrong YOU are???

whats even worse, richard straight up admits that most of the time he fucking consults other translations. He even admits to placing modern idioms in his translations, so now some people think that tolstoy and dostoevsky came up with all these sayings

You guys do know how translation works, right? Beautification and modernization happens in all translation. If not, translations would be awkward and unreadable.You can't capture a certain century of the Russian language by using older English. That makes no sense, so writers usually go for readability and faithfulness, not to language, but to its sense. Anyways, stop critiquing translations like you're fluent in Russian and English. If you were, I doubt you would've wasted time with the translations at all.

>writers usually go for readability and faithfulness
those are two opposite things
>why don't you want the rest of the world to read your country's works in garbage translations?
Хитpoвыeбaнный

Did you know this book was initially named 'War, what a disgusting subject' ?

They're not opposite. Are you retarded? Nice google translate user

>making a thing intelligible for modern audiences and remaining faithful to an old text aren't opposites!
you're a terrible troll
>nice google translation
тpaхaть тeбя

> translating from google to try to trick anonymous people on an image board into thinking you speak Russian
how you pathetic user

I've heard that Russian has had much less dramatic changes over the last ~150 years than English as justification for "improving readability". Thoughts?

It's just not a very good pic, that's all.

I want to start this review by making a statement addressed to those who have not yet read War and Peace: PLEASE, DO NOT LET THE SIZE OF THE WORK INTIMIDATE YOU - READ-IT WITHOUT FEAR, YOU WILL BE WONDERFULLY REWARDED. I confess that I myself have hesitated before I decided to adventure in the endlessly pages of the book, but once you're absorbed by the universe of Tolstoy, you can no longer escape: War and Peace is like a black hole, absorbing all to its abysmal stomach, even light, and the intellect of any human being, from the simplest to the most luminous, is happily doomed to be completely devoured by the work.

There is no way of summarizing the magnitude of this book, this novel of novels. You could say that is the story of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon's troops, with the exposure of both the life of the troops and the battles of the war and the painting of the everyday life of some important families of Russian nobility. But this summary is too poor, he makes no justice to the massive march of humanity that passes through the pages of War and Peace, the giant chain of events and lives that seethe and bubble in sentence after sentence of the novel. It's almost as if the book had in its pages the smell of the perfume of the ladies and the colony of the lords the sour taste of the sweat of the peasants and the stench of the wounds of the mutilated bodies in the battlefields; it's almost as one could feel (when one run the fingers through the pages ) the texture of the skin of the maidens and the tickles of the general's beards: the smell of humanity emanates from War and Peace with an odor of unprecedented power in the history of literature; never before has the nostrils of the readers imagination became so enraptured by the spiritual perfume of an work of art.

cont.

What the reader will find in the pages of War and Peace? Well, here's a sample: newborn babies covered in blood and wrapped in warm cloths and old patriarchs dying in bed after a lifetime of joys and sorrows; young society girls, flushed and pinky, beautiful and fresh in their party dresses and prostitutes in poor and humble rooms; rich guys drinking at parties and peasants in their huts, eating cabbage soup; shy and studious young teenagers and mockers and spenders playboys racing with their cars at high speed through the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg; shy little virgin girls playing in their rooms, whispering about their teenage loves and highly sexed society ladies, with necklines that attract all eyes, with curves that make all men salivate; bitter and cerebral man, wrapped in thoughts and philosophy's joyful and playful lords, always laughing and having fun; balls filled by the cream of Russian society and battlefields filled with rotting corpses that throwing up their pestilence to the heavens; gypsies and beggars; ladies and maids; beautiful women and ugly women; valiant men and selfish men; cold and drowsy meetings in the houses of old and semi-forgotten nobles and costume parties of young people in snowy Christmas nights; old bodies, dry as shriveled prunes and juvenile skin, rosy and sweaty with the dew of youth; health and disease; purity and decay; life and death; war and peace.

And how many landscapes! Fields full of rye, wheat and barley; plains of green grass; frozen pine forests; woods filled with the smell of rotting leaves, fungus and mushrooms; plains covered with glistening white snow by the moonlight; rivers and lakes; dusty roads; humble servants villages and large country houses; the countryside and the great cities.

And all things are handled with the utmost detail, so obvious and familiar features that are immediately absorbed by the reader, with such ease that he may not fully realize how difficult it is for one single mind to collect so many subtleties. At the same time, Tolstoy chronicles the lives of his characters without making judgments, without condemning or rewarding them, as if he were a benevolent God that understands and forgives everyone.

cont

Furthermore, the production of something like War and Peace demanded the union of several factors, a union that will rarely happen in several years in the future. First, it takes a rich man - Tolstoy could live several experiences and know several people because he could afford the luxury of leading a dissolute and carefree life; second: it takes a very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace; third: it takes a man gifted with an extremely privileged mind, a man of great intelligence - Tolstoy was an intellectual giant, and his mental ability is proven by the huge range of activities that he dominated; fourth: once again, you need a rich man, one who doesn't need to work on anything but he's book - Tolstoy owned lands, and while his servants tilled the soil and his business manager dealt with trade and business, he could accommodate himself comfortably in his office every single day, dreaming on the fate of his characters; fifth: a large organization was needed to deal with the whole mass of leaves and material produced during the process of writing the novel - Tolstoy had in his young wife, Sophia, a great ally: she organized his papers and copied the almost illegible manuscripts of her husband, something that she would make seven times. Several universal conditions had to meet in order to War and Peace be generated.

I ask everyone to READ THIS ROMACE. War and Peace is a banquet of humanity that has never been equaled, whose only rival is the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, it seems that Shakespeare and Tolstoy share the first spot on the podium of world literature. Dostoyevsky is an author I greatly admire, I can even say that I love him. But I would be unfair to Tolstoy by saying that the author of The Brothers Karamazov is on the same level as him. No. Tolstoy is in a category by himself: his work is much more varied in characters and scenes than the works of Dostoevsky.

Again: I ask everyone, PLEASE, to read War and Peace. The world becomes a richer place each time a new mind is impregnated and fertilized by the parade of existences that Count Tolstoy created. War and Peace is one of the supreme monuments of the human imagination and creative spirit.

ABOUT TOLSTOY

What I learn with War and Peace was how to use bad characteristics of my own character in order to become greater as an artist (or simply, as a person).

One of the main flaws in the soul of this great man was egocentrism: he never get rid of it, even to the last moments of his life: he was always preoccupied with his impression – of he’s being - upon others, of what others were thinking about him and with how would he be capable of impressing others.

Tolstoy was a very, very, very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace, for example. Whenever his mind settled at something (sports, gymnastics, music, economy, agriculture, theater) his goal was to completely dominate that field, and even to write definitive treatises about it (even on gymnastics he planned to write the most complete and definitive treatise). To be fair even his religious quests were moved by ambition. Having succeeded financially, aesthetically, historically, Tolstoy also wanted to be, not only a great landlord and supreme artist, but also a spiritual leader and father. There were no limits for his egocentrism.

But the enormous ambition and egocentrism of this man could have destroyed him: it usually does that to the majority of people. But not with Tolstoy: he was extremely sensitive, not only for the opinions, movements, gests and acts of others, but especially with his own conscience: he’s brain seemed to be made with the same matter as the tender antenna and fragile eyes of a snail, that are sensitive even to the smallest breeze and breath of the skies: everything touched him, everywhere and every time. He knew what his flaws were and fought to make good use of them (he could read all the small details of others, and the same was true with himself, in a much grander scale). He also didn’t allow his ego to blind him to problems in his work, to bad passages and shallow paragraphs and scenes, and so he was always correcting and rewriting, searching for perfection. All of his works emerged from a chaotic forest of drafts, a wood of dark draughts, from phrases of barbed wire distorted by scrawls and smudges and aborted sentences. He used his hunger for recognition and fame was a motor to propel his efforts in art, and, being extremely intelligent, he was able to see what was good and what needed revision in his writing. He wanted, with all the fibers of his hearth, to be great in something, and, having choose literature as his profession, he was going to use all of his mental and physical forces to fill that abyss of desire and bottomless cave of ambition that reside in his psyche.

cont

So: I learned to use the agony of egocentrism as fuel to work in an unprecedented degree of effort.

What I also learned with War and Peace was: be forever paying attention to details. Details (especially details of other humans, of other life’s and existences) are one of the supreme glories of Tolstoy’s fiction, and are capable of improving the quality of anyone’s work in writing.

Some people called War and Peace just a soap opera or a big novel. If War and Peace was, however, was only a narrative of daily life of several characters we would have much more great writers as Tolstoy in the world, and this is not the case. There is something very particular in his work, a wealth that does not seem to be found in other authors, and perhaps such greatness lies especially in this: an ability to discern details. Anyone who has tried to write seriously knows that is not remotely easy to see so many particular gestures, actions, language tics, twitches, individual thoughts, microscopic details of individuality, and in general the multiple features that make every human being a single entity. We usually capture some of these details in each other, but nothing close to what Tolstoy could capture. Other authors also have this ability, but not on the same level. Nobody seems to have seen so much, no one has the capacity of keeping so many details – collected everywhere and for long periods of time – safe in mind for so long until the opportunity to use them in fiction arose. The mental eyes of Tolstoy were the most light-absorbing in literary history: no other author paid that much attention, or at least was able to remember all the particulars collected thorough his persona experience until the time of writing finally appeared.

Tolstoy seemed to be, in his mind and in his five sentences, a flayed man, perpetually naked in raw meat, without the tick skin of numbness: every little vibration in the environment around hit him with significant strength. A butterfly for the common man reverberated with the force of a hawk to this man, the sensitive of sensitive’s.

So, in short: I leaned with Tolstoy how to use ego-flaws as fuel for creation. And, in the act of creation per se, I learned the importance of detail and of paying attention to the whole of life that surrounds me.

WHAT MAKES A TOLSTOY?

Tolstoy is the wonder that he is because of the congregation of several different factors. There is a very real quote about the nature of Genius, that partially explains its rarity, which states that: “Genius is the happy result of a combination of many circumstances.”; it was made by Havelock Ellis, in his Study of British Genius. Tolstoy, not only a literary genius but one of the supreme literary genius of all time, was, him too, a combination of several factors.

1) First things first: he was a very intelligent person and a very sensitive man. He was always paying attention not only to himself (he wrote obsessively about his own life, personal doubts, problems, achievements, disappointing’s, fears and desires, in a diary which he kept for almost all his life, from 16 onwards), but also to people around him. He was very proud, a huge egocentric, and he searched fervently for the approval of others. Thus he was always paying attention to others, to their expressions, their words, their thoughts, their simple gestures, their facial movements – he was deeply sensitive to that and could read on other what they were feeling. Many intelligent men have only contempt for the public, and walk in their lives inside some sort of bubble: they despise others and remain faithful only to themselves and their spiritual teachers (composers, writers, mathematicians, philosophers, and other mental heroes): this is some sort of defense; they fear the public; they fear rejection, or maybe they simply don’t care with other people – they are sufficient to themselves. Even many writers are like that, but those writers will never be supreme geniuses (like Shakespeare and Tolstoy), because they lost many of the prisms and facets of humanity that socially ambitious man (again, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy: for Tolstoy desired literary fame and recognition fervently – as well as any recognition he could get - , as is stated in his diaries) absorb during their life’s. Make a test: go to a restaurant and observe that many people just sit down, enjoy their meal silently and don’t even look to their sides, while other people are always paying attention, looking to the people in other tables, perhaps thinking about their physical appearance, their clothes, their gestures. Tolstoy was one of those people who pays attention – he was always trying to guess what impact he made on others and what others were thinking of him.

cont

2) He was a rich man. Tolstoy could live several experiences and know several people because he could afford the luxury of leading a dissolute and carefree life. Most of us leave school to University already needing to sustain ourselves with jobs and loose many important living hours in boring offices. Tolstoy was an heir to a great fortune, and although he always felt some ambivalence toward it (guilt), he also enjoyed with little care. He lived his live when he was young. He gambled (and lost a lot of money); visit hookers; pay gypsies to play music for him and to fuck their girls; visit the great cities of Europe; visit the great cities of Russia; enjoyed balls with the high society (when he almost always didn’t do nothing, just stay there, shy and with fear, contemplating the other dance – he was thought to be a “boring partner” by most of the girls). Also, like a rich man he could choose even to go to war and get out of the war whenever he wanted. So he also had the experience of the battlefield, but not the traumatic experience (which destroys a man forever) of being forced to fight until the very exhaustion of his physical and mental forces.
3) Tolstoy was a very, very, very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace, for example. Whenever his mind settled at something (sports, gymnastics, music, economy, agriculture, theater) his goal was to completely dominate that field, and even to write definitive treatises about it (even on gymnastics he planned to write the most complete and definitive treatise). To be fair even his religious quests were moved by ambition. Having succeeded financially, aesthetically, historically, Tolstoy also wanted to be, not only a great landlord and supreme artist, but also a spiritual leader and father. There were no limits for his egocentrism.

4) Tolstoy had enormous amounts of energy, and, as a rich man, he could sleep and eat well, without any preoccupation with the future. He always enjoyed a good health, and could spend hours and hours every day sited in his office reading, writing, rewriting and then rewriting some more. His energy was so exuberant that even his sex life presents huge surges of luxury. His diaries are replete with sexual adventures, to whom Tolstoy crawled, drooling, like a beast at one night, only to repent himself to the very marrow of his soul the next day. He was a powerhouse of a man, and, like I said, he had the time and comfort to recover he’s being.
5) A large organization was needed to deal with the whole mass of leaves and material produced during the process of writing Tolstoy’s major novels, but Tolstoy had in his young wife, Sophia, a great ally: she organized his papers and copied the almost illegible manuscripts of her husband, something that she would make seven times for War and Peace. Had Tolstoy not find such an able, caring and effortful partner, he maybe would not have remained working to War and Peace for the whole time of the project, for example.

Several universal conditions had to meet in order to Tolstoy’s work to be generated.

No one cares, dude.

Hey, I read the review and found it nice. Someone gushing about why he likes a novel always makes me curious. I do think the whole "ABOUT TOLSTOY" part is too much to expect anyone here to read it.

I read the P&V translations of War and Peace, AK and The Brothers Karamazov before discovering online that they are hated. Is it worth going back and reading different translations? What will be different? And don't make me read 10 different articles please.

The best death scene ever committed to page.

sud i akshually read this garbage?

There's nothing wrong with it. The whole "P&V is bad" shtick is nothing more than people making a big deal out of nothing. The truth is, all translations will have errors, and from my experience the translator doesn't matter. P&V read fine to me and I enjoy them.

Ignore this guy. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Main thing you should take away from this: translations don't matter as much as people tell you they do.

This guy does this every single time. All he does is post a bunch of links. Good job.

P&V are great for Dostoevsky. They're pretty good for Tolstoy, but I would go with Maude.

>translations don't matter as much as people tell you they do

What's the greatest?

my diary desu

Good review even though you most likely didn't really write all that.

>hough you most likely didn't really write all that.

Why do you say that? There's nothing special in that guy’s post

Posted that so I could get to answer this question, it's In Search of Lost Time

It's a really fantastic book. I started reading it around this time last year and I look back at that time very fondly.

Advanced warning: what happens with certain characters is going to fuck you up, or at least put you in a pissy mood for a bit.