Which one should you trust? The answer is: none of them. Los Angeles Times: “Echoes of Tolstoy” by Natasha Randall Katz, who is among the translators of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, does some careful spot-checking on four translations (Maude, Dunnigan, Briggs, and Pevear/Volokhonsky).

New England Review: “War and Peace in Our Time” by Michael R. War and Peace: Translation ComparisonĮxtracts from the different translations of War and Peace are included below so that you can compare the language. It was published in 2007 with the controversial title War and Peace: Original Version. Manuel Komroff produced an abridged version of Garnett’s text which served as the basis for the 1956 film starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.Īlexander Bromfield translated an earlier (shorter and very different) manuscript of War and Peace. The two volumes were published in 1889.Īn abridged translation by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, English-born daughter of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, was published in 1949. Huntington Smith, starting with a French version, separated the “plot” of War and Peace from Tolstoy’s essay sections, which he grouped into a separate volume titled The Physiology of War. War and Peace: Miscellaneous Translations 2007 – Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.I count 7 complete translations available in contemporary editions and 4 out of print. If you just want a quick-and-dirty recommendation on which translation to choose, jump to the conclusion. It was first translated into English (via French) by Clara Bell in 1886. War and Peace was first published in Russia serially, then published in its entirety in 1869. Depending on how you count, there are between 5 and 11 complete English translations available to choose from. So you want to read Tolstoy’s best-known work, a thousand-page philosophical/historical epic encompassing hundreds of characters both real and fictitious, and you don’t read Russian. Which translation of War and Peace should I read?

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