The French Passages of Tolstoy's War and Peace in English Translation

Shedding Light on the Shadows: The French Passages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in English Translation by Caitlin Towers Timothy Portice, Advisor Julien Weber, Second Reader Comparative Literature Thesis Middlebury College Middlebury, VT February 8, 2016 1 Introduction Lev Tolstoy first published the entirety of his novel War and Peace in 1869.1 It did not take long for his work to reach a foreign audience, and the first translation of War and Peace into English was completed between 1885 and 1886. Over the past century and a half since its publication there have been twelve major English translations of the novel. Archdeacon Farrar, who was a 19th century cleric and author, said “If Count Tolstoï’s books have appeared in edition after edition, and translation after translation, the reason is because the world learns from him to see life as it is” (Dole, iii) Each translation of a novel speaks to a different generation and different audience, and helps decades of readers learn “to see life as it is” in ways specific to their times. With each new translation Tolstoy’s novel becomes accessible to and relatable for new audiences, ranging from a British audience at the turn of the century to an American audience in the middle of the Cold War. Although all of these American and British translations vary in ways that are fascinating culturally, politically and historically, this study focuses specifically on one aspect of the translation of War and Peace: the different ways in which the many passages of the novel originally written in French are translated. The manner in which translators choose to represent these specific passages varies widely in different English translations. In my thesis, I propose to answer this question: How do the different ways in which the translators of War and Peace interpret Tolstoy’s French passages bring to light the complexity and significance of Tolstoy’s artistic and linguistic choices which prove so challenging and divisive for his translators and their audiences? At the root of this question lie three more: can the same information be imparted 1 There were six major editions of the novel published during Tolstoy’s lifetime. Translators most often use the fifth edition. 2 to readers through both domesticating and foreignizing methods of translation?2 In which cases does retaining the French make the novel more clear, and in which cases can removing it create smoothness and clarity for a reader? Lastly, what linguistic implications regarding the historical, cultural, and political background of the novel are lost in translation, and which ones can perhaps afford to be lost? The first edition of War and Peace was published in 1869, but it is debated to this day which of the first six editions of War and Peace published during Tolstoy’s lifetime should be seen as the definitive version. Unlike the first and second, the third and fourth editions of the novel, published in 1873 and 1880 respectively, translated the French passages into Russian. The fifth and sixth editions, however, restored the French to the novel. The fifth edition was most widely used by translators in the 20th century. Because there were editions of War and Peace published in Tolstoy’s lifetime without the major digressions into French that were present in the first and second editions, there was much debate as to whether Tolstoy really wanted these French passages in the novel at all. In his book Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a Study, R. F. Christian writes: As the writing of the novel progressed, there is evidence that Tolstoy began to doubt the wisdom of his use of foreign words in a Russian novel…Eventually in 1873, when Tolstoy drastically revised the published novel, all the French words were cut out. Writing later in the same year to Strakhov he confessed: ‘I was sometimes sorry about doing away with the French, but on the whole I think it is better without it.’ Although Tolstoy veered round to this conclusion in the 1870s, the fact remains that the French words were later restored in the definitive edition, and had presumably been introduced originally for some definite reason. (158-9) This passage shows that Tolstoy himself weighed the cons of his inclusion of French passages above the pros at times, but they are ultimately restored in later editions of the novel. 2 Domesticating methods of translation seek to conform the source text to the target culture, while foreignizing methods of translation retain aspects of the source text even when they do not conform to the conventions, writing or otherwise, of the target culture. 3 For this study, I chose to focus on nine different translations. The first, which is Clara Bell’s 1886 translation, uses the 1884 French translation of the novel by “Une belle russe” as a source text.3 Bell’s version is only 366 pages in total, whereas most translations are at least three times as long. In her translation, Clara Bell cuts and paraphrases many sections of the book. Although important elements of plot are retained, it is more of an interpretation of the novel than a true translation. Rather than trying to recreate Tolstoy’s novel, Bell uses material from War and Peace to create her own French work. In 1898, Nathan Haskell Dole published the first English translation of War and Peace that used Tolstoy’s Russian as its source text. Dole keeps some amount of French in his translation, but he chooses to translate most of the larger sections of French. The French words and phrases that he keeps are those that would most likely be familiar to an educated American reader at the turn of the 19th century. He does, however, include a footnote right at the beginning explaining that many conversations were held in a mixture of French and English, which many later translators did not do. These linguistic choices suggest that his target audience would recognize French phrases, or at least appreciate having them in the text. Dole is also the first translator into English who directly addresses Tolstoy’s use of French in the novel, which suggests that he considered the retention of some amount of French to be important to translating Tolstoy. 3 This 1884 French translation is one of four different French translations of the novel that were used for reference throughout this research. These French translations were the 1884 translation by ‘Une Russe’, the 1945 translation by Henri Mongault, the 1960 Boris de Schlozer translation, and the 2010 translation by Élisabeth Guertik. They all left the French passages roughly as they were and noted the difference between what was originally in French and that which was translated with footnotes or italics. 4 The two most well known English translations of War and Peace from the first half of the 20th century are that of Constance Garnett in 1904 and Louise and Aylmer Maude in 1922. 4 Both Garnett and the Maudes lived in England and knew Lev Tolstoy personally. In Aylmer Maude’s biography, The Life of Tolstoy, he writes that at one point Tolstoy “commended some recent English versions, including work done by Mrs. Garnett and by my wife.” (440) Both Garnett and the Maudes translate most of the novel into English without distinguishing between languages. Garnett’s remains one of the most widely read translations of the novel even today. She also began a long line of female translators of War and Peace into English. In The New York Review of Books Orlando Figes writes of Garnett, “No one did more to introduce the English- speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett”. The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, which was published in 2000, praises the Maudes’ translation above any of the other early English editions of War and Peace: “The Maude translations of Tolstoi boast an unimpeachable pedigree.” (1405) These two acclaimed British translations began a trend that continued for the rest of the 20th century of translating most of Tolstoy’s French into English. Princess Alexandra Kropotkin’s 1949 translation, unlike that of Garnett or the Maudes, explains her decision to translate most of the French passages in her preface. She writes, In families of the Russian nobility, French was a second language […] In War and Peace, this accounts for the many conversations written originally in French […] but even before Russia’s war with Napoleon, the noble families of Russia spoke French so currently that several of Tolstoy’s characters in War and Peace find it difficult to express themselves in Russian. All these French conversations have now been translated into English, to make the reading of this great novel easier for all. (vii-viii) 4 Leo Wiener also published a translation of the novel in 1904. Garnett’s translation is still frequently published, and because of this, it is Garnett’s and not Wiener’s that will be included in this study. Unlike Wiener’s translation, which retained Tolstoy’s French, Garnett removed almost all of the French passages. 5 Kropotkin makes explicit from the beginning of her text that she uses a domesticating method of translation regarding the French words and phrases. Her translation is abridged; it shortens many of the battle scenes and cuts the novel down to 741 pages, whereas most English translations are over 1000 pages long. Sections of Tolstoy’s historical commentaries are also cut out, and Kropotkin rearranges some dialogue in the novel. She had the approval of Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s daughter, in many of her choices that departed from previous translations of the novel. One of the most notable of these was her choice to remove all diminutives in the novel, which domesticates the text by removing what she calls a “peculiarly Russian way of speaking” (vii) for the ease of the reader.

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