Much of this is down to personal preference. This is Penguin’s chosen translation, which they switched to from Rosemary Edmonds’s version. However, that was before new translations of War and Peace entered the scene…Īnthony Briggs translation (Penguin Clothbound Classics)įor me, the best translation of War and Peace will always be the Anthony Briggs translation. The translation received a good welcome, including by a young Hemingway, who recalls telling a friend that he could never get through War and Peace-not “until I got the Constance Garnett translation.” Garnett published her translation in 1904, working on it while Tolstoy was still alive, and she once travelled to Russia to meet Tolstoy at home. She hired a secretary who would read the Russian text to her aloud, and she would dictate back the English translation. But she also had the hurdle of losing her eyesight while working on War and Peace. Garnett was largely a self-taught translator and lacked a lot of the dictionaries and resources that would have made translation easier. I don’t think it’s necessarily the translation you should read – it’s neither easy-to-read nor precise – but it does have an interesting backstory. Garnett’s translation of War and Peace is in the public domain ( ), or via Dover Thrift as a paperback. Constance Garnett translation (Dover Thrift Editions)
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