Talk: Which Version of War and Peace Should I Read?

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Talk: Which Version of War and Peace Should I Read?

Wed, 15 January7 : 00 PM

Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk – both translators themselves – get asked questions like this all too often. In this talk, they try to provide a few answers – and to give readers a few guidelines that may help them to find their own answers.

Which books get translated from Russian, and how often they are re-translated, can seem a random matter. The literary merit of the original and the quality of previous translations have often been less important than international politics and publishers’ ideas of what will sell. Some great books – like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – get translated over a dozen times in a few decades; others have to wait fifty or sixty years for a translation.

Beginning with the fables of Ivan Krylov (Russia’s answer to La Fontaine) and continuing through Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel, Platonov, Pasternak, Grossman and others, Robert and Boris will discuss some of their favorite translations and say why they like them.

Robert Chandler has translated Sappho and a selection of Apollinaire for Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include many works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and (together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski) of Russian Poetry.

Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews. He has translated and co-translated several volumes of poetry and prose from Russian and Polish, and is the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).

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