Special Projects in Translation: Tolstoy’s War and Peace

Course Description

Summary

This intensive advanced translation workshop focuses on student work. Meant for those who have taken Ethical Translation and learned the nuts and bolts of translation there – or otherwise have translation and/or extensive foreign language experience – here we dig into your longer translation projects. The aim of the course is to transform your approach to a substantive project, enabling you to solidify your methodology.
As we do this work we will consider translations of Tolstoy’s magnum opus War and Peace. First published serially from 1865 to 1867, Tolstoy considered this his most important work. Its impact on world literature and the modern novel would be difficult to overstate. In early weeks we will familiarize ourselves—all too briefly—with War and Peace and its history of translation via background reading, translator’s introductions and other materials. We consider three of the most respected extant translations: the Norton Critical Edition revised by George Gibian (1996), based on the earlier venerated translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1966); a 2005 retranslation by Anthony Briggs; and a 2007 retranslation by the popular Russian translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. We will select and read one in full. 

Reading each other’s work with care and attention is required. Applying the same dedication to your own is crucial. While we will read other translations and related material as models, and in order to think alongside practiced translators, the primary methodology of this course is that of learning by doing. The doing includes both translating yourself and productively critiquing your peers. You learn how to edit your own work by editing others. Given this policy absences will not be tolerated, unless in the most extreme circumstances. 

You will walk out of this class ready to translate an entire book and having read, in full, one of the world’s great literary works.