War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
(Anthony
Briggs
Translation)
"As for Tolstoy,"
James Joyce wrote to his brother, when Joyce was 23, "I disagree with you
altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid,
never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!"
What did Joyce mean by not
being theatrical? "Then suddenly the most fearful scream - it couldn't be
hers, she couldn't have screamed like that - came from inside the room. Prince
Andrey ran to the door. The screaming stopped and he heard a different sound,
the wail of a baby. 'Why have they taken a baby in there?' Prince Andrey
wondered for a split-second." That is the untheatrical, impure, confused,
comic way of describing a man as he waits for his wife to give birth. Tolstoy's
War and Peace, whose unparaphrasable plot covers Russia during the Napoleonic
wars, is a 1,400-page exercise in - a treadmill of - irony; and it is gleefully
experimental.
With War and Peace, Tolstoy introduced
two novelistic innovations, both based on his new principle of length, which
was part of his constant principle of irony. The first is luxurious detail.
There is suddenly space to record deft things such as: "A doctor in a
bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and
little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it."
There are bad jokes, an emperor in trendy narrow shoes, mispronounced place
names, dresses that have to be mended just before someone goes out. The second
innovation is the way he breaks into the narrative, introducing historical
essays. Flaubert and Henry James disliked them, considering them irrelevant and
un-novelistic. But they can be exhilarating too: like the details, these essays
are ironic. They are exercises in deflation.
Such fun with form, however,
has not always been obvious from his English translations. In 1889, for
example, a man called Huntington Smith (working from a French version) abridged
the novel into two sections - one for stories, one for essays - retitled it
"The Physiology of War", and explained that Tolstoy was significant
because he "had a message to deliver, a message worth hearing, and the
world has shown itself ready to hear". This depressing sentence can stand
as an allegory of the things that can go wrong in translation.
But things have more often
gone right. There are excellent translations by Constance Garnett, Rosemary
Edmonds and, my favourite, by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose version was approved
by Tolstoy. And now there is a new translation, by Anthony Briggs, which is
accurate and clear; and, in general, faithful. But there are problems with
fidelity. Everyone, after all, has different definitions.
Tolstoy, says Briggs, in his
note on the translation, is "an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively
easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are
infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualised but always
natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of
smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue."
I have three reasons for
feeling that Tolstoy has been betrayed here. First, this idea that he is an
easy read in Russian. Vladimir Nabokov would remind his students that
"simplicity is bunkum. No major writer is simple", and go on to show
how Tolstoy's style is made up of "creative repetitions" - "he
gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words". For instance, Russian
allows a gap between an adjective and its noun, and Tolstoy loved to elongate
that fact. So in the final chapter, when Natasha is in the middle of a happy
ending, Tolstoy describes her (literally) like this: "And a joyful, and at
the same time pathetic, asking forgiveness for her joy, expression, settled on
Natasha's face." This is not smooth Russian, but deliberate complication.
In Briggs's translation, it reads: "And Natasha's face had shone with
happiness, though it also had a pathetic look as if to apologise for any
happiness." It is not that English offers him many ways of imitating
Tolstoy's weird syntax, but that is no reason then to make out that nothing has
been lost. It is no reason not to try. "Have you noticed Tolstoy's
language?" asked Chekhov. "Enormous periods, sentences piled one on
top of another. Don't think that it happens by chance or that it's a
shortcoming. It's art, and it only comes after hard work."
Secondly, this idea that a
translation should be happily smooth. I agree with Milan Kundera:
"Partisans of 'flowing' translation often object to my translators:
'That's not the way to say it in German (in English, in Spanish, etc.)!' I
reply: 'It's not the way to say it in Czech either!'"
And thirdly, there is the
dialogue. The three great previous translators of War and Peace were all educated
women. Briggs is impatient with them, on the grounds that their language could
not be equal to the brute earthiness of the soldiers' dialogue on battlefields.
But it is not obvious that Briggs is so earthy either. "'You all right,
Petrov?' inquired one. 'We gave it to 'em hot, men. That'll keep 'em quiet,'
another said. 'Couldn't see nothing. They were hitting their own men! Couldn't
see nothing for the dark, mates. Anything to drink?'" How much better is
this than dialogue which Briggs dislikes: "I say, fellow-countrymen, will
they set us down here or take us on to Moscow?"
No, this novel is spikier than
it now looks. While Moscow collapses, Pierre Besukhov is trying to predict the
future, using a weird key which combines numbers with the French alphabet.
Napoleon adds up to 666. Besukhov then tries to find Napoleon's numerical
equal. Having failed with the Emperor Alexander, and the Russian nation, Pierre
thinks, naturally, of himself: he doesn't work either. Finally, after adding in
his nationality in French - russe - and then misspelling it, Pierre gets it
right: "Dropping the e again (quite unjustifiably) Pierre got the answer
he was after in the phrase l'russe Besuhof - exactly 666!"
L'russe. If you needed an
emblem of the novel, an un-French word - thrussian - made up by a
French-speaking member of the Russian aristocracy would be it. And yet, in this
translation, the loopiness of Pierre's bad French is mildly lost, because
Tolstoy's sporadic French ambience has been cut out. It provides, therefore, a
stray, enforced moment of polyphony.
It is a small stylistic
moment, but everything in this novel is small. Because War and Peace is a great
novel not because Tolstoy's characters worry about God and death and nations,
but because they make up weird words. Its subject is not grandiose: it is
chance. And the only way to show this is minutely. Tolstoy is the greatest
miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical. This outlandish,
wonderful novel - which survives all of its impossible, necessary translations,
including this thorough but imperfect one - is a masterpiece of reduction, and
has style.
