Notes Along the Way: Reading War and Peace
Usually when I share my notes along the way, I talk about a specific problem or challenge I’ve encountered in the course of my translation work. In this article, I thought it might be helpful to share my thoughts on a “problem” I’ve encountered as a reader of a translation, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
I should say from the outset that I don’t speak or read Russian. Some people might, then, feel it is presumptuous of me to attempt to identify problems in the translation of a text brought over from Russian. The problem, though, arises not from its relationship to the original language – at least, not as far as I know – but its relationship to someone like me, a reader who does not have access to the original. This is significant because I am exactly the sort of person War and Peace has been translated for – a reader who does not have access to the Russian version, but who is ready to engage with any good literature. War and Peace is one of the great books of the world, one often talked about by people who care about literature. It is precisely the sort of thing I want to read, and I am precisely the sort of reader the text anticipates.
When I started reading the novel, I enjoyed the story very much, and at times found some wonderful turns of phrase that appealed to me, though I could not say I was exactly swept up by it. The problem was that I encountered numerous clunky sentences that forced me to go back and re-read them in order to catch the sense. This happened frequently enough to be a little distracting, but not so frequently that I felt like putting the novel aside. As I read, I was discussing the novel with a friend, who was reading it at the same time, and had planned to ask her about this issue when we spoke, but before I could mention it, she asked me what I thought about the translation. We talked about it for a while, and I mentioned the issues I had with the text. We looked at a few places where the issues seemed most prominent. Here’s one example:
A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One, holding a mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while Number Two with a trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon's mouth.
(Aylmer and Louise Maude translation, 1923 – a Tolstoy-approved translation)
It is relatively easy to see here that there is something that isn’t quite working in the English version of the text. It is an unwieldy usage of English. The syntax is not easy on the English-speaking ear. I would go so far as to say it doesn’t allow for a smooth read at all, but instead causes the reader to stumble a bit. And what is the deal with the mop? From context, you can perhaps guess that it has something to do with the cannon, but the word feels out of place.
After my friend and I talked about my discomfort with the translation, I decided to switch to a different translation as I continued to read. I picked up both the Anthony Briggs 2005 translation and the Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky 2007 translation. Naturally, one of the first things I did was to compare the above sentence and see how it was rendered in these two texts.
Briggs:
A huge burly soldier, the number one gunner holding the cleaning rod, sprang up to the wheel, his legs widely braced, while number two rammed the charge down the cannon’s mouth with a shaking hand.
Peaver and Volokhonsky:
Number One, a huge, broad-shouldered soldier with a broad stance, who held the cleaning rod in his hand, sprang up to the wheel. Number Two, with trembling hands, put the charge in the cannon’s mouth.
Both of these renderings are so much more natural and elegant than the Maude translation. Importantly, neither loses the meaning of the text. In this instance, I prefer the Briggs translation because he unpacks the various modifiers of a single noun (“Number One” is [1] huge, [2] broad-shouldered/burly, [3] holding a cleaning rod / mop, [4] legs far apart / legs widely braced / with a broad stance), creating a bit of space by moving one of those modifiers (legs widely braced) after the verb (sprang up to the wheel), instead of keeping it before the subject (Number One / gunner / number one gunner). The other two both keep all 4 modifiers before the action, with the Maude translation even turning “Number One” into a separate modifier set apart from the subject “gunner” (Peaver and Volokhonsky turn it into the subject of the sentence, while Briggs treats “number one gunner” as a single phrase functioning as the subject). The syntax of both the Briggs and Peaver-Volokhonsky translations read much more smoothly in English, and they do so without changing the meaning. In fact, I would argue that the meaning becomes clearer because of the smoothness of the language. The image is immediately accessible when just skimming either of these two renderings, unlike the Maude version, which requires a second look for the image to come into focus.
If I didn’t know better, from this sentence, I would almost guess that the Maude translation was something like a first draft that was eventually edited and polished to become either of the other two translations. It feels like a rendering that is somewhere between the Russian and the English, moving just far enough from the original to have the words from the new language, but not yet put together in the way they normally would be in that language.
Of course, I don’t base my evaluation of the Maude translation on this sentence alone. Rather, I am drawing it out here as an example of what I would consider a clunky translation. It might be perfectly accurate, in terms of the definitions of the words used – I would assume that is generally true of this translation – but it on occasion fails the test of communicating the picture being drawn to the new reader in an immediate way. From everything I have read about War and Peace, I presume the reading of it in Russian presents the story in a way that allows for the sort of immediacy that we find in both of the newer translations, but which is lacking in the Maude translation. I would argue that this sort of immediacy is integral to the text, and the failure to capture it is a failure to be faithful, regardless of how “accurate” it might be. Faithfulness includes accuracy, but it does not stop there. It renders accurately and elegantly.
I suspect that there is a possibility that the clunkiness of the Maude translation is at least in part due to it being dated. Many prominent literary figures of a century ago, when the Maude translation was new, gush over War and Peace after their reading of that version. I think this definitely demonstrates that there is always a need for fresh translations of books that have been translated before.
That said, the observation I would make based on my own reading of a translation from a language which I do not speak is that the elegance of the language in the target language is no less a part of faithfulness than the accurate rendering of each word. The elegance is what turns a lump of clay into a sculpture. Putting the right words together is just the beginning. Applying the craft of shaping them into the finest forms possible is what finishes the job and creates a masterpiece. This is no less important in the translation of the work than it was in the creation of the original.
©2022 Shelly Bryant