BOOK REVIEW
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Marian Schwartz, edited and with an
introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Yale University Press, 2014. Translator’s note
and end notes, xxxii + 754 pp. $35 (cloth and eBook).
So here we have one more translation into
English of the greatest novel ever written in the history of world literature
(my opinion, but not only mine). The publicity announcements and blurbs make big
claims for this book. Marian Schwartz, a renowned translator with extensive
experience, “embraces Tolstoy’s unusual style—she is the first English language
translator ever to do so.” Hmm. “Clearly a labor of love—over a decade in the
making—this translation is the most accurate Tolstoy we have in English.” Hmm.
Marian Schwartz “bequeaths us not a translation at all but Tolstoy’s English
original.” Huh?
Such grandiose blurbery places quite a
burden on the shoulders of the translated text. Let’s see if the text can bear
such a heavy weight, but before getting to the novel itself, a few words about
the front matter—an introduction by Prof. Gary Saul Morson, and a note by the
translator.
Professor Morson is also given credit
for editing the translation, but nowhere are we told exactly what he did to
edit it. Did he read through the text, evaluating it for smoothness of style in
English? Did he check the entire English text, comparing it with that of the
Russian original? Did he consult the best-known previous translations into
English and compare this new text to them? We don’t know.
Leaving aside the issue of its merits or
demerits, Morson’s introduction presents a problem at the outset. Do we want to
get right to communing with the literary art of a great writer, or do we, first
of all, wish to be enlightened by a literary critic? I, for one, vote for
getting right to Tolstoy. I don’t want to be told how to read a book before I
begin reading it, nor do I want to be told what it’s all about. That’s a matter
between me, the reader, and Tolstoy, the writer. Then again, someone who cannot
read the novel in Russian already has one intermediary, the translator, to deal
with. Why add one more at the start? So I would vote for the litcrit material
to be placed in the back matter of the book, after the novel is over. But nobody
asked me.
INTRODUCTION
“The Moral Urgency of Anna Karenina”
Gary Saul Morson
Whenever I read literary criticism I am
reminded of what somebody somewhere once said: when interpreting creative
literary art you almost inevitably distort or oversimplify. I’m sure I do the
same thing myself. Recently I have been posting on my blog in increments the
entirety of my lectures on “Anna Karenina,” from my thirty years of teaching at
Miami University. No doubt they are replete with oversimplifications and
distortions. There’s no real way to get around this.
Prof. Morson begins with the first
sentence in the book: “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” “What exactly does this sentence mean?” asks
Prof. Morson. Well, the point of all literary fiction is that it does not exactly mean anything. It has a plethora
of interpretations. Morson’s is certainly of great interest. He says that it
means happy families resemble each other because there is no story to tell
about them, no drama in their lives. Unhappy families make for dramatic
stories, and each story is different (ix).
Okay, I can buy that. It’s one of many
interesting interpretations of that first sentence, one of the most famous
sentences in world literature. But then again, think about this. Ever since the
novel was written, readers and critics have gone blue in the face discussing
that first sentence, but I’ve never heard anyone challenge the logic of the statement. Think about it.
Do all happy families resemble one another? Hardly. Happiness is not all of a
piece, and I’d bet there are plenty of happy families that have little in
common (other than their happiness). Is every unhappy family unhappy in its own
unique way? Maybe. But unhappiness sometimes has a way of being rather banal
and ordinary. Life is limited in the ways it can bestow unhappiness upon a
family. So much for the first sentence.
Now for Prof. Morson’s interpretations
of the main characters. They too, these interpretations, are often brilliant,
but not definitive. First of all he determines that Anna is a fatalist and a self-destructive
character. She and she alone is responsible for what happens to her. She revels
in her feral impulses, gets thoroughly wrapped up in eros-thanatos, drives
herself onward to her inevitable violent end. I believe it. There is plenty of
evidence for this in the novel. “The omen [the man being crushed under the
train early in the novel, in the scene where Anna and Vronsky first meet] is
fulfilled only because she chooses to fulfill it” (xii). Well, yeah, but…After
all, the very artistic structure of the novel cannot be manipulated or
controlled by the central character, and that very structure is steeped in fatalism.
Tolstoy at one point has Anna and Vronsky both dreaming the same uncanny,
frightening dream. Anna progresses through the novel inevitably toward her
doom, but pinning all responsibility on Anna is going too far. If you want to
blame anyone for Anna’s death, blame the one whom Anna Akhmatova blamed:
Tolstoy himself, or the Tolstoy influenced by the puritan mores of his Moscow
aunts.
In line with the same argument Morson
suggests that Anna could have had everything she wanted—both a marriage to
Vronsky and her son Seryozha. Caught up in her self-destructive impulses she
refuses such an arrangement. At one point (Part IV, Ch. 22, p. 396) Karenin
does indeed offer to confess to adultery, selflessly take the burden of sin
upon himself, so that Anna can have a divorce and can marry Vronsky. But this
is just a passing fancy. Karenin’s bursts of magnanimity come and go. His visit
to the divorce lawyer (338-39) makes it clear that getting a divorce in the
Russia of the 1870s was a complicated business. In Part III (258-59) he decides
that he is not willing “to let her be united unimpeded with Vronsky, for her
crime to be so much to her advantage. . . . in his heart of hearts he wished
her to suffer.” At the end of Part IV, when Karenin suddenly makes his magnanimous
offer, Anna refuses to accept his generosity, and Morson makes much of this,
her refusal to demean herself and (subconsciously) her self-destructive urge.
But there is really only this one brief
moment when Karenin is willing to provide Anna and Vronsky with everything they
want, and they miss that brief chance. They go abroad (399), “not only without
having obtained a divorce but having resolutely refused one.” This appears to
be rather irrational behavior, but you cannot ascribe it solely to pride or self-destructive
impulses. After all, at this point in the novel both Anna and Vronsky are
physically and emotionally weak, each of them very recently having almost died.
They just want to get away from the whole turmoil, they go abroad. They miss
their one chance to get the divorce, and later on in the novel Karenin never
again repeats his offer. In a word, it’s an oversimplification to say that Anna
could have had all she wanted, could have lived on in a peaceful life with
Vronsky, had she not been so bent on self-destruction.
Morson makes Alexei Karenin into,
largely, a positive character. There are grounds for doing this; over the years
I have had students make the same argument. The most wonderful thing about
Tolstoy as a writer is the way he draws highly rounded characters. Karenin is,
basically, a decent man. There are times in the novel when the reader cannot
help feeling sorry for him. After she falls in love with Vronsky Anna treats
her husband not like a human being, but like a thing, a pair of ears. People in
society mock him, laugh and jeer in their hearts at his every appearance, he
the cuckolded husband. At one point he feels as if he must be circumspect in
his every move, because people are ready to rip him apart the way a dog pack
rips a wounded dog.
That’s all on the one hand. One the
other hand there are a lot of facts as well. Based on a few minor details, Morson
makes a case for the Karenin marriage. “Surely this was a marriage as good as
or better than most!” (xv). That’s a
hard point to support, unless you assume that most marriages are halfway bad or
really bad. Tolstoy never gives us much detail about the life of the Karenins
before the action of the novel begins, but most of the details we have suggest
that this was, at best, a tolerable marriage.
Morson emphasizes how Karenin is the one
character in the novel “moved to genuine Christian love and forgiveness.” It’s
true, and it’s highly ironic, that this dry stick of a man is the best
Christian of them all. But only temporarily. Tolstoy knows better than to make
Karenin the hero of the novel. His Christian epiphany cannot be long lasting.
It’s a burst of emotion, totally ephemeral. Later on in the novel, under the
influence of the sanctimonious Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Karenin’s ostensible
Christian feelings are tempered by sham sanctimony, and he dresses his hatred
for Anna in fake Christian vestments.
In his attempts to elevate Karenin to
the position of a hero Morson makes much of one passage, about how Karenin
looked after the baby daughter of Vronsky and Anna (legally his own daughter).
“She surely would have died had he not taken an interest in her.” Karenin,
therefore, “is the only character in this novel who saves a life” (xiv-xv). But
are we really to take this passage literally? Would the little girl have died
if Karenin had not taken an interest in her? This was, after all, not a peasant
child living in a village in provincial Russia, where, at the time the novel is
set, women sometimes deliberately rolled over on their children and smothered
them in the night, so as to simply rid themselves of an unnecessary burden.
This was a child brought up in a family of the aristocracy, with wet nurses and
caretaker nurses and governesses.
You can’t read every sentence in such a complex
writer as Tolstoy as gospel truth. Take this one: “Stepan Arkadyevich was
always truthful with himself” (5). Read the novel as a whole and one thing certain
about Stiva is this: he lies to himself on a regular and steady basis, and
that’s how he is able to ignore the way he is bankrupting his family in aid of
his profligate life. The sentence about truthful Stiva should be read
ironically, as filtered through his own personal viewpoint. Stiva tells himself that he is always truthful
with himself, but he is lying. Similarly, the sentence about how little Annie
would have died if not for Karenin is right in the middle of a paragraph that
filters everything through the viewpoint of Karenin. The implication is that he
himself, Karenin, has that thought about saving Annie. Tolstoy can be masterful
at presenting POV of a character in a text that is third-person omniscient.
Those two sentences, the one about Stiva’s truthfulness with himself, and the
one about how Karenin saved Annie’s life, are good examples.
Later in the novel Karenin’s devotion to
the little girl Annie seems to have been totally misplaced. He lets Anna and
Vronsky take the child (he could have refused them that, as the child is
legally his), and nowhere is he shown to have missed Annie or to have wanted
her back. He does get her back, by default, after Anna’s death, when Vronsky
leaves to fight and (he hopes) die in Serbia (707). We are not told how Karenin
reacts to having Annie back. Maybe he dotes on her once again; we have no way
of knowing. We do know that Karenin cannot find any love in his heart for his
own son.
“The real hero of AK is Dolly,” says
Prof. Morson. Well, yes, I can buy the argument that Dolly is a positive
character, a decent woman of principle, but she is, of course, a secondary
character. Then again, Morson emphasizes how Tolstoy’s views were old-fashioned
in his time and sometimes almost bizarre in the modern world: “his views are
even more at odds with educated opinion today” (xxii). Try telling your average
contemporary American woman reader, steeped and marinated for the past forty
years in the principles of feminism, that Dolly is a heroine—in anyone else’s
mind but that of her conservative creator, whose whole novel exalts family life
with children and castigates sensuality, licentiousness, adultery.
Dolly’s scapegrace husband Stiva
Oblonsky, meanwhile (says Morson), is the bad guy of the book. Stiva is, in
fact, evil (xvi-xvii). This oversimplification is repeated by the translator in
her introduction: “Stiva is the villain of the book, its representation of what
evil is” (xxvi). At least Morson qualifies his statement: “not the worst evil,”
and “he [Stiva] does not have a shred of malice.” For anyone who reads the
whole of this long novel “evil” is not a word that can be applied to Stiva. He
is the most vivacious and life-loving character in the book. Wherever he goes
he radiates good will. He is utterly frivolous and irresponsible, but all the other
characters love him. Time and again he is shown to be totally democratic in his
principles, willing to help others of all classes. See, e.g. p. 10, when Stiva
takes the time to meet with, and offer help to a petitioner, as one of many
examples of his kind heart. Tolstoy himself, often ruled by his stern puritan
code in his daily life, could not as an artist help liking Stiva. Stiva is just
too likeable not to like, despite his many faults.
As is obvious from what I’ve written
above, I find much to disagree with in Prof. Morson’s interpretations. Where I
most agree with him is where he stresses that Tolstoy's message, probably the
most salient message of the whole book is the ANTI-ROMANTIC message. Anna
Karenina did not necessarily have to die because she was self-destructive, but
she did have to die because Tolstoy was so thoroughly opposed to anyone’s living
a life based on romantic, sensual love.
TRANSLATOR’S
NOTE
Marian Schwartz
The translator mentions that this work
“has been more than a decade in the making,” and is for her “the most exciting
translation ride of my life” (xxvii). I can imagine that. If you’re a
translator and you’re given a chance to work on the greatest literary work in
the history of world literature, it must be a thrill. But imagine this
scenario: you’ve been constructing your spiffy new frigate for, say, nine
years. You foresee in the not too distant future the time when you’ll be
breaking a champagne bottle over the bow and launching your beloved craft—to a
full-throated roar of acclaim from all over the English-speaking world. Why,
never a better frigate has ever been built! But then you look up from the final
polishing of the bow and stern, and in the distance you see a huge battleship
called the Pevear-Volokhonsky come steaming its way into port, blowing its
whistle and flexing its smoke stack.
Of course, it did not happen exactly like
that. The P-V translation of AK was published in the year 2000, presumably
before Marian Schwartz began her labor of love, so she was not taken unawares.
Nonetheless, in making her claim to have written the best-ever English-language
AK, she is certainly aware that her main rivals for the honor are the
translator pair of P-V. The rivalry with P-V seems to underlie the publication of this new translation, especially since Prof. Morson, who wrote the introduction, has published an attack on all the P-V translations of Russian literature, calling into question the preeminence (widely accepted in American Slavic academia) of P-V as translators. See "The Pevearsion of Russian Literature, "Commentary," July/August, 2010.
In her translator’s note Schwartz lays claim
on the first two sentences of the book. Not mentioning P-V by name, she starts
by citing their first sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way” (xxiv). Then she explains why her first
sentence is better: “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” Moving on to the second sentence, “the
book’s moral and stylistic cornerstone,” she makes an argument for “The
Oblonsky home was all confusion.” The P-V translation has “All was confusion in
the Oblonskys’ house.” Schwartz’s argument is rather belabored, but I can buy
her sentence. Although the P-V sentence would be equally fine with a couple of
slight changes: “All was confusion in the Oblonsky home.” To cite a couple of
older translations, the Modern Library version (Constance Garnett updated) has
the clearly inferior, “Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household,”
and the Norton Critical Edition (Maude) has the even worse, “Everything was
upset in the Oblonskys’ house.”
So, in my opinion, Marian Schwartz has
won the battle for the first two sentences. Assuming that the older
translations are not serious contenders (which, however, you should not assume
with alacrity), the question is this: does she win out over P-V in the struggle
for all the rest of the sentences in the book? I’ll get back to that later.
Schwartz’s main argument in favor of her
translation is that she is the first to preserve the roughness of Tolstoy’s
style, the first not to correct his “mistakes.” After all, he was an obsessive
rewriter of his text, so when he got to the end of the rewriting you have to
assume that that was the way he wanted it. In the space of two sentences, for
example, he uses the phrase “the family members and the servants” three times.
If he did that in Russian then you must do it in English. So that’s what
Schwartz does, and I believe she is right. Most of the time, anyway.
Tolstoy also has a way of using the same
key words throughout the text. Schwartz has counted all instances of vesyolyj (gay, happy, joyous, cheerful)
and its corresponding nouns and verbs; the number comes out at 316. Very
perspicaciously she remarks that if you stick in such a joyous word so many
times over the course of the book “the reader begins to wonder just how
cheerful anyone really is” (xxv). Point well taken. She does not mention this,
but there is even a character who embodies the joy-taking word in the novel,
and his name is, appropriately, Vasenka Veslovsky. It would translate into
English as something like “Jack Joy.” Marian Schwartz would perhaps render him
as “Charlie Cheerful.”
I like Schwartz’s idea that you should
try to use the same word in English every time that vesyolyj or one of its
variants shows up. Her choice is “cheerful,” but she cautions the reader that
you can’t use “cheerful” exclusively, since “two words in different languages
will always have different ranges of meaning.” Then you read the book and
discover that she sometimes ignores her own advice. “Cheerful” shows up too
much, and sometimes it is gaily stuck into sentences where it just won’t fit.
Take this (Part I, Ch. 29): “Anna felt herself being swallowed up. But she
found it not frightening but cheerful” (94). Something not quite right there.
P-V has “But all this was not frightening, but exhilarating.” The Russian text:
“No vse eto bylo ne strashno, a veselo.”
The word “exhilarating” for “veselo” might be a stretch. I’d try this: “But all
of this was not frightening, but full of joy.” Or, to take a worse example, Vasenka
Veslovsky is going out to party with the peasants, and he says, “Farewell,
gentlemen. If it’s cheerful, I’ll call you” (540). That’s an awkward sentence
in English. You have to give up on “cheerful” here. What he means is, to
paraphrase, “If we’re having a good time I’ll come back for you.”
This is not to say that I don’t admire
Schwartz for her efforts. I do. But in now going on to treat her translation in
some detail, I have to keep asking myself the main question: has she really
done the best translation into English of AK ever done? One other question
before we begin: given her insistence that previous translations don’t measure
up, is Marian Schwartz consistently checking
previous translations as she works? We don’t know. But in places where she
repeats previous errors you kind of wonder. When I was working on translating
Ivan Bunin’s works, I made it a point not to look at previous translations.
Once in a while, when I simply could not figure out a locution, I would take a
peek. And guess what? Most of the time the previous translator had simply given
up on the word or phrase, had thrown the offensive passage out the window with
the slops, and then blissfully gone on about his/her business. Marian Schwartz
certainly does not do that.
THE TRANSLATION
Since I do not have the ten years it
would require to check the Schwartz translation line by line with the original
Russian, and to compare its sentences to all those of previous translations, I
have proceeded as follows. Reading through the Schwartz (from now on termed S),
when I come upon sentences that strike me as somehow off, I check the original
as well as the following translations: (1) Pevear-Volokhonsky (P-V) (2) Modern
Library Edition, translation by Constance Garnett, as revised by Leonard J.
Kent and Nina Berberova (ML) (3) Norton Critical Edition, L. and A. Maude
translation (NC).
The beginning sentence in Ch. 2 of Part
I is one of those rough Tolstoyan sentences that S mentions in her note. But
she makes the roughness smooth: “Stepan Arkadyevich was always truthful with
himself” (5). ML has “S.A. was a truthful man with himself.” P-V gets the
roughness best here: “S.A. was a truthful man concerning his own self.” Not a
very good sentence in English, but the Russian original is awkward as well.
Part I, Ch. 26: Levin returns to his country estate and says
(S, 87), “It’s fine being a guest, but being home is better.” ML has, “Visiting
friends is all very well, but there’s no place like home,” and P-V: “There’s no
place like home.” I’ll go with P-V here; translate a proverb by a proverb.
Part I, Ch. 30 Anna returns home from Moscow, in love with
Vronsky, and she sees her husband in a new light. From then on she sees him
mainly as a pair of ears. The Russian is “Otchego
u nego stali takie ushi?” S: “Where did he get those ears?” P-V: “What’s
happened with his ears?” ML: “Why do his ears look like that?” NC: “What has
happened to his ears?” I’d call this one a draw.
All through the novel Vronsky is said to
have krepkie zuby. S, along with
everyone else, goes with “strong teeth.” Is it only me, or is that just not
said in English? I don’t know any way to do this except “good teeth,” but I’ll
check with my dentist to see if anyone ever says “strong teeth.” At times those
bothersome teeth give a toothache to the translators. P-V: “The nagging pain in
the strong tooth” (780). Huh?
In Part II, Ch. 16 we come upon a passage
that seems as if calculated to drive translators mad. By way of describing a
minor character, the merchant Ryabinin’s steward (or clerk), Tolstoy uses the
adverb tugo (tightly) four times in
two sentences. P-V: “A little gig was already standing by the porch, tightly
bound in iron and leather, with a sleek horse tightly harnessed in broad tugs.
In the little gig, tightly filled with blood and tightly girdled, sat
Ryabinin’s clerk, who was also his driver” (167). Give P-V an ‘A’ for effort
(for getting the ‘tightly’ in four times), but that “tightly filled with blood”
is bizarre. The Russian here is “V telezhke sidel tugo nalitloj krov’ju i tugo
podpojasannyj prikazchik,” literally, “In the cart sat the tightly infused with
blood and the tightly girded steward.” I don’t even know exactly what the
Russian here means (“tugo nalitoj krov’ju”), and I doubt if the translators do
either.
Here is S: “Pulled up at the front steps
was a buggy fitted in iron and leather [she gives up on the first tugo], with a sleek horse tightly
harnessed with wide traces. Sitting in the buggy was the blood-engorged,
tightly-belted steward who served as Ryabinin’s driver” (155). So she gets only
two of the four tugos, and she gives
us that awkward “blood-engorged.” ML throws up its hands in the face of the tugos and the “tightly filled with
blood”: “At the steps there stood a trap covered with iron and leather, with a
sleek horse tightly harnessed with broad collar straps. In the trap sat the
chubby, tightly belted clerk who served Ryabinin as coachman” (178). We get only two of the four tugos, but you got to love that otsebjatina (invented by the translator)
“chubby” there. The translator has embellished Tolstoy’s clerk, “improved” on
him by giving up on the bothersome tight blood, then adding on some pounds and
plumping him up!
The NC translators (the Maudes), in my
book, deserve a Hero of the Soviet Union medal for the way they handle that
bothersome business of “tight blood”: “At the porch stood a little cart
strongly [strongly?] bound with leather and iron, and to the cart was harnessed
a well-fed horse with broad, tightly stretched straps. In the cart sat
Ryabinin’s clerk (who also performed a coachman’s duties), his skin tightly stretched over his full-blooded face [my emphasis,
YES] and his belt drawn tight” (152). To me that’s as good a guess as any and
probably the best anybody can do with the phrase of the tight blood.
In addition to the problem of all the tugos here, the passage presents all
sorts of other problems: how, exactly, is the horse harnessed in (with wide
traces? with broad collar straps? with tightly stretched straps?); and what is
the conveyance, a buggy, a cart, a gig, which one? Ponder deeply on the passage
with the tugos and the tight-blooded
whatever, any of you readers who may be considering becoming a literary
translator!
Part III, Ch. 2 In contrast to the tugo business above, to that complicated phrasing, sometimes one
word, or a very simple passage in the original can cause problems. The one word
here is roevnja. Walking out on his
estate, Levin comes across a peasant who is carrying a roevnja with bees. Most of the translators I have checked use the
word “hive” for roevnja, which is
incorrect. The word for hive is “ulej.” Roevnja
is a kind of bast netting where swarms of bees are placed to transport them
from one place (or hive) to another. Of the four translations I have checked only
NC has it right: “carrying bees in a swarm carrier.”
Here’s the simple passage. Levin asks the
peasant, “Chto? ili pojmal, Fomich?” Literally: “What? Or did you catch [it,
them, bees], Fomich?” Russian can often do without the direct object when it is
understood. English cannot. S: “What’s this? Did you catch that, Fomich?”
(223). The reader is slightly shocked: what does the word ‘that’ refer to? P-V:
“Did you catch it, Fomich?” Same problem. What does the ‘it’ refer to? If it’s
“bees,” then it should be, “Did you catch them,
Fomich? NC: “Have you found one, Fomich?” One what? ML uses a bit of otsebjatina, but I believe that’s the
best approach here: “Taken a stray swarm, Fomich?” That’s good. Point goes to
ML. Here a very simple problem, the absence of a direct object in Russian, leads
the translators astray, and only one of the four I have consulted successfully
renders this into English. That translator also uses otsebjatina (ownself making up), which is illegal. But then, in the
realm of literary translations, all rules are made to be broken.
Part IV, Ch. 9 Kitty is trying to catch with her fork
“nepokornyj otskal’zyvajushchij grib.” S: “a recalcitrant, slippery mushroom”
(353) [Good]. P-V: “a disobedient slippery mushroom” [Good]. ML: “a perverse
mushroom” [clearly wrong].
Part V, Ch. 6 The word “molodye,” literally “young ones,” is
used in reference to Levin and Kitty, who have just been married. S: “After
supper that night the young people left for the country” (420) [clearly wrong].
P-V: “the young couple” [right]. ML: “the young couple.” You could also
translate the word here as simply “the newlyweds.”
Part V, Ch. 21 Karenin is “shamefully and repulsively
unhappy,” oppressed by the hatred of people all around him in society.
S: “He felt it was because of this,
precisely because his heart was lacerated that they would be pitiless toward
him. He felt that people would destroy him, the way dogs suffocate a dog
lacerated and howling from pain” (464). “Suffocate” won’t work here, although
the Russian word can mean “suffocate” or “strangle.” Dogs can’t suffocate or
strangle another dog. And normally in English you howl “with” pain, not “from.”
P-V: “as dogs kill a wounded dog howling
with pain” (better)
ML: “men would crush him as dogs rip the
throat of a crippled dog yelping with pain” (somewhat embellished, but not bad—my
favorite of the three translations here—point goes to ML again)
Part VI, Ch. 23 Tolstoy has so many wonderful lines. Here is
Anna, telling Dolly why she wants no more children. The Russian reads, “Esli
ikh net, to oni ne neschastny po krajnej mere.” Literally: “If they are not,
then at least they are not unhappy.” You can’t get it that perfect in English.
S: “If they don’t exist, then at least
they are not unhappy” (583). [Good]
P-V: “If they don’t exist, at least they
won’t be unfortunate” (638). “Unhappy” is better than “unfortunate.”
ML: “If they are not, at any rate they
are not unhappy.” That “if they are not” is good, it’s a literal translation of
the Russian, but it’s not English.
In the same conversation Anna goes on to
say that if she brings unhappy children into the world she alone is to blame
(guilty). Dolly comes up with a wonderful thought in answer to this, another
sentence that is perfect in the Russian, but cannot be exactly duplicated in
English:
“Kak byt’ vinovatoju pred sushchestvami
ne sushchestvujushchimi?” Literally: “How can you be guilty before beings that
are not in being?”
S: “How can she be guilty before beings
who don’t exist?” (the “she” is wrong here)
P-V: “How can she be guilty before
beings that don’t exist?” (the “she” is still wrong)
ML: “How can one wrong creatures that
don’t exist?”
NC: “How can one be guilty toward beings
who don’t exist?”
The word “guilty” in English presents
special problems. It does not appear to have a perfect preposition-complement.
In Russian the person toward whom you are guilty is always expressed with the
preposition “pered” or “pred” (before). You took Ivan’s pie, so you are guilty before Ivan. But that won’t work in
English. Are you guilty toward
somebody? In regard to somebody? “Of”
works to express what you have done: I’m guilty of taking your pie. But there seems to be no perfect
preposition-complement to use in regard to the person you have offended. Given that fact, S, P-V, and NC above are
guilty of using inappropriate prepositions. The winner of the point here is me
(with a nod to ML): “How can you wrong creatures who don’t exist?”
Part VII, Ch. 2 Here we have a proverb about drunkards, and
all of the translations I have checked do a good job.
S: “The first shot’s a squawk, the
second a hawk, and after the third—like tiny little birds” (616)
P-V: “The first glass is a stake, the
second a snake, and from the third on it’s all little birdies.”
ML: “The first round sticks in the
throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like
tiny little birds.”
NC: “The first glass you drive in like a
stake, the second flies like a crake, and after the third they fly like wee
little birds.”
Part VII, Ch. 28 Anna is in the middle of a long stream-of-consciousness
riff, her anguished mind skipping from image to image.
“Voda moskovskaja tak khorosha. A
mytishchenskie kolodtsy i bliny.”
S: “Moscow water is so good. Oh, the
springs of Mytishchi and the pancakes” (688).
P-V: “The Mytishchi springs and the
pancakes” (757).
ML: “Ah, the springs at Mytishchi and
the pancakes” (787).
NC: “Oh, and the wells in Mytishchi, and
the pancakes!” (685).
Two problems here. The Russian letter
“A” at the beginning of the second sentence is a conjunction (“and” or “but”),
and not an exclamation. So P-V wins out on that one (by simply omitting it and
not exclaiming). But NC is the only one that gets the wells right. “Springs” here
is bad (1) because kolodtsy means
“wells” and (2) because the word “springs” creates confusion. In the Russian we
are clearly speaking of water, but in the English word “springs” we could be
speaking of spring seasons in Mytishchi.
Finally, on p. 737 of the S translation
there is a misprint or mistake that slipped past the proofreader. The word
“Kitty” shows up in the middle of the page, and then, two lines later, we get
“but the Katya’s dress was soaked through.” Should be, “but Kitty’s dress was soaked
through.” It’s as if some importunate Russian translator had elbowed his way briefly
into the book, grabbed Marian Schwartz’s pen, forgetting that Katya is most
often called Kitty (and has just been so called two lines up, and is so called
by Tolstoy in the original), and, unable to grasp the use of English articles, this
jerk sticks an extra “the” in there for good measure. I point out this error
not in some caviling spirit, but really to congratulate the translator—this is
the only such error I have found in the whole long book!
SUMMING UP
This review is up to 6000 words. If I
had the time and energy to go on comparing passages in various translations it
could easily go to 10,000, 20,000. So the sad fact is this: I can’t really tell
you if Marian Schwartz has done the best translation ever into English of Anna Karenina. The sampling of
comparative passages above is simply too small to be statistically relevant. To
see who wins enough points to win the whole game we would have to go on and on
and on.
I suspect that the Schwartz translation
is very good. It reads well, it shows evidence of extremely conscientious work.
I enjoyed reading (for the umpteenth time) Tolstoy’s AK through the mediation
of Marian Schwartz! Pointing out places where her translation is in error (as I
have done above) is not entirely fair—because I have not gone to the trouble to
point out the many many passages where Tolstoy is rendered into English
effectively, sometimes even brilliantly. And there are surely many more of those
successful passages than the unsuccessful ones.
Is the S translation better than the
P-V? Once again, I don’t know. The sampling of passages is too small, and I’ve
never read P-V all the way through. Then again, we tend to accept new
translations as somehow automatically better than the ones already out there.
Some of the samples above suggest that we may too quickly assume that good old
Constance Garnett or the good old Maude couple are somehow automatically
inferior. Take another look at my sampling. It’s rather surprising how
often the ML or the NC translators have done a better job than S or P-V. In a recent article in "The New York Review of Books" ("Socks," June 23, 2016), Janet Malcolm discusses translations of "Anna Karenina" into English. She relentlessly deprecates the English style of both P-V and S, suggesting that older translators, such as Constance Garnett and the Maudes, should perhaps still be relied upon for the best renditions of this classic novel. My small sampling suggests that she may be right.
What’s the solution? Here’s my idea.
Since Anna Karenina is the best work
of literary fiction ever written, and since the target language of English is
probably the most important target language in the world, don’t you think AK deserves
some highly unusual, even herculean effort? Why not let all living translators
of AK make one more collective effort? Let S and P-V and whoever else is still
out there come together for a mass translation marathon. They could bring with
them Constance and the Maudes and all other now-dead translators in the person
of their books. Then they would sit together and hash out the whole
thing—checking texts and arguing their way through to the final, definitive,
best-ever translation of AK into English. It might take them a year to do it,
but it would be worth it. That’s what I think anyway.
