How glad I am that I'll never be as famous as Tolstoy. The dismal early drafts of my novels will remain forever hidden. I cannot begin to imagine how the great man would have felt had he known that a scholar would spend 50 years shuffling through his papers, piecing together fragments and discarded chapters to produce what I can only think of as War and Peace Lite. It's so much better, his philistine publishers assure us. More peace, less war, and - because it leaves out 400 pages of French conversation and philosophical reflection - so much easier to read!
To which all I can say is - humbug. I first read War and Peace aged 15 (in an all-English translation) and what I loved most about it was its length. It was a book you could live in - a book that offered you a grand and fully furnished second life. The philosophical reflections were the best parts. Reading these, I felt as if I'd been invited into a Russian drawing room to discuss world affairs with the author himself. And never more so than when I reread the book as a snooty undergraduate, in a German translation that kept all that sublimely stilted and oh-so-nuanced French conversation in the original.
So I won't be buying this leaner, meaner version; I can see it has nothing to offer a snob like me. But I do feel bad for the translator. And if you missed this part of the story, let me fill you in. He's landed in the middle of a dreadful literary spat, which began last week when his publishers were lambasted in an open letter written by Richard Pevear, who not so long ago did a new translation of War and Peace (what he calls the real War and Peace) with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky. This was followed by a damning statement from Pevear's editor at Knopf. The decision to bring out the shorter version in translation was, he said, a "serious mistake". This may be true - but it's not the translator's fault, is it? If you knew what sort of money people in our line of work get paid, you'd say that his most serious mistake had been to go into the translation business in the first place.
As for RE-translations - well, I've done one myself, and talk about glass houses. No translator is immune to criticism - as Pevear himself has now discovered. Because one open letter breeds another. And in his letter, Daniel Halpern (the editor of the short version) has suggested that the righteous Pevear may not be qualified to judge the new translation, as he was not able to read it in the original Russian. So now people are asking a new question - can this man even call himself a translator?
Of course he can. It's one thing to take a novel from Russian into literal English. It's quite another to take it from literal English into literary prose. When I say that, people tend to throw up their hands and scream about accuracy. To which I say, that's not the issue. Of course, accuracy is essential. But to aim only for accuracy is to reduce a novel to an affidavit. A literary translator must also find the voice, the tone, and the rhythm that will make the book work in English. This makes him or her an interpreter as well as a translator, and wherever there is room for interpretation, there is, of course, a chance that a translator might go too far. But I imagine that a Russian-speaking translator wife would be alert to such moments. And I know from experience that when two people pore over an early draft, arguing over every sentence, they can come up with solutions that neither could have produced alone.
Unless, that is, one of those people is a very powerful editor. I say this because of last week's other literary tempest. This one pits Tess Gallagher, widow of Raymond Carver, against Gordon Lish, the editor who, she says, cut the man's stories to shreds. What Gallagher would like to do now is to publish a collection of his stories as they were before Lish put the hatchet to them.
Again, Knopf is at the epicentre - but this time it is they who are the publishers of the leaner, meaner version. The editor who edited Carver later in his career has said that he would rather dig his friend out of the ground than publish these stories as the author originally wanted them. He implies that the edits came about as a result of measured discussion. But what if Carver - who was never rolling in money, and who had to struggle to be published - agreed to the hatchet out of desperation? If Gallagher, who is a distinguished poet, thinks the original versions are worth seeing, my guess is that they are. If Knopf seems to be contradicting itself - defending the long version of one book while trying to block the long version of another - my guess is that they are less concerned about artistic integrity than they are about money.
