There are excellent translations by Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds and, my favourite, by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose version was approved by Tolstoy. This depressing sentence can stand as an allegory of the things that can go wrong in translation.īut things have more often gone right. 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'. Such fun with form, however, has not always been obvious from his English translations. But they can be exhilarating too: like the details, these essays are ironic. Flaubert and Henry James disliked them, considering them irrelevant and un-novelistic. The second innovation is the way he breaks into the narrative, introducing historical essays. 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. 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. 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.

'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.

The screaming stopped and he heard a different sound, the wail of a baby. 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. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!' 'As for Tolstoy,' James Joyce wrote to his brother, when Joyce was 23, 'I disagree with you altogether.

War in french translation