Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
It seems the P&V translation hews close to word for word and is a little stiff. Is there another translation that leaves the French untouched?
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Oxford World's Classic edition, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, revised by Amy Mandelker
From Notes on Text and Translation
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Oxford University Press first published the English translation of War and Peace by Aylmer and Louise Maude in their 21-volume Centenary Edition of Tolstoy’s Works (Oxford, 1928–37). The Maude translation has long been considered the best English version of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, despite the subsequent publication of numerous other translations. The Maudes consulted the most accurate edition of War and Peace available to them, which included corrections made separately to the third and fifth editions of the work. They were personal friends of Tolstoy, and dedicated themselves to translating his work into English, as well as to writing their own accounts of his life and his ideas. Their translation of War and Peace has quite justly acquired the status of a classic in its own right, and readers continue to appreciate its elegance, fidelity, and helpful apparatus. Biographer A. N. Wilson states that ‘every English reader owes a vast debt to Louise and Aylmer Maude for their contributions to Tolstoy scholarship’.1 Leo Tolstoy himself asserted that ‘better translators [than Aylmer and Louise Maude] could not be invented’, and he chose to authorize Louise Maude as translator of Resurrection.
Despite the excellence of the Maudes’ War and Peace translation and annotations, their edition has drawn a certain amount of justifiable criticism: in particular, critics have noted the Anglicization of Russian names, the translation of the French passages into English, the insertion of narrative chapter headings composed entirely by the Maudes, and a tendency to elevate the level of discourse inappropriately and according to Victorian literary tastes.
This new redaction of the Maude translation is intended to correct and refurbish the Maudes’ edition, aligning this English version of the novel as closely as possible to Tolstoy’s original text. The French passages have been completely restored, names are given in their Russian forms (an exception is made for the names of Tsars and saints, which are retained according to their customary usage in English, e.g. ‘Peter the Great’). The small errors or omissions of the Maude edition have been corrected and the language has been adjusted where dated usage and non-idiomatic discourse impede the reading process. The transliteration system used is GOST (1971), except where there is a more commonly used and more familiar transliteration choice, e.g. Tolstoy instead of Tolstoj.
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I don't know how much it is known, but Richard Pevear doesn't really speak Russian, you can read some comments about it
here