The Best WAR & PEACE English Translation of All Time?

[Russell Valentino]

The David Remnick NY-er piece was in the November 7 number for 2005. It 
doesn't say a lot about War and Peace specifically, though it does note that 
it's the next big project of Pevear and Volokhonskaya. It mentions the new 
Briggs  translation (which is not among those I've used in class). It also 
doesn't make Constance Garnett look so good. And it's entertaining, though not 
as entertaining as the Smithsonian Magazine piece "Tolstoy does Oprah" by Tom 
Frank that came out when she picked Anna Karenina for her summer reading 
selection. It's here --
(http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2004/september/lastpage.php).

But on topic, I have used the Maude translation, the Garnett, and the 
Dunnigan. One of our reference librarians at Iowa found an essay for me a 
couple of years ago (which I've misplaced for the moment) that actually 
evaluated all the translations then in print (in the 1990s, I believe) and 
concluded that the Dunnigan was the best. It wasn't that different, in my 
opinion, from the others.

One troubling aspect of the Maude translation is the use of chapter headings 
that provide synopses of the content, e.g., "Natasha, at the opera, is seduced 
by the marble shoulders of the beautiful Helene," "Prince Andrew's wound opens 
(again)," and so on, or something like that. Not only are these not in the 
original, they're the wrong period for English lit. But the Norton apparatus 
is otherwise useful. I'll teach Tolstoevsky again in fall and will have to 
decide which to use this time around, so I'm interested to hear other thoughts.

Russell Valentino

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