It is a difficult book to read and follow.

I did so for the reverse of the reason that I original changed from her version! I came to believe that since the book was written around 1873, her translation might be closer to the intent of the writer.Īltogether it must have taken me almost a month to read extraordinary since I bought the 2014 Bartlett version on November 29th, 2017, but did not complete the book until Christmas eve about 30 days! I simply couldn’t continue reading it and simultaneously enjoy the book.

Some, like Garnett, simply copied it without translations Bartlett, on the other hand, translated the lot. Thus to translate Tolstoy one had to maintain the original text. There are thousands.Īs is known, Russian nobility which, by the way, constituted a very small section of the population regarded Russian as a vulgar language, therefore all spoke French as a matter of course, often also learning some German and English. Also she translates each and every one of the highly frequent French sentences, and many German ones also. Bartlett constantly 'stars' and 'numbers' notations about small details and names. Her translation became increasingly irritating.īartlett's version, although using fewer pages, is far more detailed. However, after reading Bartlett's interpretation for a large chunk of the book to attempt to justify the expense I found I might have been hasty. I felt that, being about one and a half generations younger, my appreciation of the narrative would be improved by a later interpretation. I changed from the Garnett version because I felt that her translation was written in a slightly older, pre-war, type of English. By that time I became too irritated to continue and I reverted to the earlier version. I read until about two thirds of the way through that version. She is an Oxford Don, which I admit impressed me, and I decided to download that from Amazon at a cost of AU$8.43.īartlett's version offered about 870 pages.įinding my place from the original version, I commenced reading the new one from there. Another was Rosamund Bartlett's translation completed in 2014. One was by an American couple, well known but I've forgotten their names easy to look up of course. I thought that there must be other translations. She died in 1942.Ībout one sixth of the way I became a little disenchanted by her prose, or interpretation. I began with the zero cost Amazon Kindle version of over 1100 pages, translated by Constance Garnett.

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