The Hindu : Front Page : Battle over a book

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Tuesday, Oct 23, 2007
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Battle over a book

Los Angeles: “Tell me, why this nasty war?” asks a character in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Almost 140 years after the first publication of the epic novel, a nasty duel has broken out between rival versions published in the U.S.

The argument between the new translations is, fittingly, one of weight. Acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s faithful version of Tolstoy’s tale of birth, death, love, war and peace clocks in at 1,267 pages and features all of the 500 or so characters Tolstoy introduced as the Russian nobility dealt with Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia.

Facing it in bookshops is British translator Andrew Bromfield’s reduced, “original” version. The Bromfield War and Peace, first published in Britain earlier this year, runs to just 886 pages, does away with the French and the philosophical digressions, and boasts a happy ending. In the words of the shorter version’s Russian publisher, Ecco, it is “twice as short, four times as interesting... more peace, less war.”

What might have been an interesting quirk of the publishing schedules degenerated into a full-blown, publicity-generating literary spat when Mr. Pevear wrote an open letter criticising Ecco for its “philistine attitude towards Tolstoy.” Mr. Pevear’s editor at the publishing house Knopf called the shorter version a “serious mistake.”

The editor of the shorter version, Daniel Halpern, shot back. “Not surprisingly, Mr. Pevear does not address the Ecco translation in any substantive or meaningful way,” he wrote. “Perhaps this is due to the fact that Mr. Pevear doesn’t actually read the original Russian... To characterise it as the ‘not real’ version, and to suggest Tolstoy’s posthumous intents, are unfortunate, even laughable posturing swipes.”

Mr. Pevear does not read Russian; his wife is the Russian speaker on the team. But that has not stopped their previous work from succeeding. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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