Like most prose writers, I believe Count Leo Tolstoy was one of the greatest writers of fiction ever. His real competitors are not numerous, and few of those who have expressed scorn for Tolstoy's work (Rebecca West, say, or Joseph Brodsky) are credible. (West said of Anna Karenina that she was Tolstoy in drag and Brodsky, who was a rotten judge of literature, was sneeringly scornful of those who preferred Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky, though Dostoyevsky himself thought Tolstoy the greater writer.)
So for me, new translations of Tolstoy are occasions to revisit his precise mind, his genius as a storyteller and the variety of his approaches to moral matters and moral questions. New translations also offer us a chance to look at the current state of translation, to think about how we translate and what that says about us and our expectations.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Knopf/Random House Canada, 500 pages, $35
This new collection of Tolstoy's work, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, was translated by the most celebrated pair of translators currently working in our language: Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. (Interestingly enough, they are, after Louise and Aylmer Maude, the second married couple to admirably translate Tolstoy. Perhaps two minds are best where Tolstoy is concerned.)
In various interviews, Pevear has described their working process: Volokhonsky does a first, complete, literal translation of the work(s). Pevear then rewrites her work in such a way as to make it into the kind of English his ear dictates. She then rewrites his rewrite, so that it conforms to her idea of the original. They go back and forth like this a few times, until they have arrived at a version that pleases them both. In this way, they have translated Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov and Chekhov. They were the translators of the Anna Karenina that, with Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, became a bestseller in the United States, and they brilliantly translated Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 2007.
Vladimir Nabokov described Tolstoy’s style as that of the “groping purist.” He goes on to say, “In describing a meditation, emotion or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contour of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering.” Volokhonsky and Pevear give us the “groping purist,” but also the writer of quick, probing, almost “Hemingwayesque” prose. Their Tolstoy is, at times, awkward, but his every sentence has what even Henry James – who thought Tolstoy too slipshod to be great – conceded his work has: vitality, energy.
The Tolstoy who emerges in the language of Pevear and Volokhonsky is sometimes surprising, but he is stronger for it
Volokhonsky and Pevear are also, for the most part, faithful in word as well as spirit to Tolstoy’s original. Their version of The Death of Ivan Ilych, for instance, says “pouffe,” “gymnast” and “vint,” where the Guerney/Maude translation changed Tolstoy's words to “ottoman,” “athlete” and “whist.” They trust Tolstoy’s precision, his words, even when doing so means adding footnotes to the text, or making thing slightly – very slightly – more difficult for the reader. In checking (at random, and not obsessively) their translation against the original, I found only one instance when Volokhonsky and Pevear were – inexplicably – wayward, but that passage gives a good sense of the character of Volokhonsky and Pevear’s Tolstoy.
Here (in Volokonsky/Pevear) is Ivan Ilych Golovin speaking to his wife after his fall: “It’s not for nothing I’m a gymnast. Another man might have been badly hurt, but I just got a slight knock here; it hurts when you touch it, but it’s already going away; a simple bruise.”
