Louisa Ermelino

War and Peace

Could you get a better title? Tolstoy knew his stuff. And yesterday, Sonny Mehta feted Knopf's new translation by husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky at The Russian Tea Room on 57th Street. The private fourth floor room was incredibly ornate, not a spot of wall or floor wasn't painted, carpeted, embellished, a Czarist Russian fantasy, and I was told that rooms exist beyond this one with bears and easter eggs and basically, "You ain't seen nothing yet."  There were huge bound manuscripts of the new translation and galleys are expected soon.

Just mentioning War and Peace begs the question: have you read it? The informal survey around my table resulted in a series of "no's". I wonder, should I have also asked about Gogol's nose? Has Gogol shot up the Amazon.com list with the release of Jhumpa Lahiri's movie, The Namesake? Everyone knows about Gogol's Overcoat, does everyone know about Gogol's Nose?

I love the Russian writers, and after hearing Pevear and Volokhonsky talk about the work of translating (they were so intelligent and so charming. "What was the most difficult part?" the crowd asked, and Larissa said, "the boring bits." And her husband talked about the dialogue and how incredibly rich the Russian language was in Tolstoy's time, even more so than it is today, and how there would be only one word choice in English when in Russian, there were many. But my favorite anecdote was the turtle soup dilemma. Were there cox combs in the turtle soup? or scallops? Larissa researched the recipe and while scallops got into the manuscript, a sauce of cox combs will appear in the finished version), I am going to read this book. I even know when. As soon as I get the galley.

Posted by Louisa Ermelino on April 20, 2007 | Comments (3)