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Lucy Day Werts
People have different purposes in reading, and different esthetic taste.
My own first choice would be the Maude/Mandelker translation as it seems like a good balance between smooth, non-modernized English and text updated to correct errors. Fans of Pevear & Volokhonsky will choose theirs, as it claims to be the most authentic, albeit at the cost of smoothness.
However, the Mandelker and P&V editions are both fairly scholarly, so they have lots of notes in the text, and they both include text in the original French, with English translations added in notes.
The two translations that were written with a non-academic reader in mind are the Dunnigan translation published by Signet Classics and the Briggs translation published by Penguin and which use modernized language and don't have notes or embedded French. Dunnigan is American and Briggs is British.
For links and to find out more about the various translations of War and Peace, visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English, at:
https://welovetranslations.com/2021/0...
My own first choice would be the Maude/Mandelker translation as it seems like a good balance between smooth, non-modernized English and text updated to correct errors. Fans of Pevear & Volokhonsky will choose theirs, as it claims to be the most authentic, albeit at the cost of smoothness.
However, the Mandelker and P&V editions are both fairly scholarly, so they have lots of notes in the text, and they both include text in the original French, with English translations added in notes.
The two translations that were written with a non-academic reader in mind are the Dunnigan translation published by Signet Classics and the Briggs translation published by Penguin and which use modernized language and don't have notes or embedded French. Dunnigan is American and Briggs is British.
For links and to find out more about the various translations of War and Peace, visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English, at:
https://welovetranslations.com/2021/0...
Valerie Kirk
War and Peace (Signet classics) [Dunnigan] -- (UNABRIDGED) Ann Dunnigan was born in Hollywood and here she has presented us with a very nice contemporary (1968) "American English" version of Tolstoy's Magnum opus. I call this one the "doctor's office version" because, even though it is 1,456 pages long (Signet paperback/Penguin), a busy errand-runner can still reasonably carry it around without backache. I found the translation itself to be quite competently rendered and most of the text reads straight through with no footnotes to deal with for the French language parts. If you're an American, and plan to read War and Peace only one time, and you're a really busy person who likes to read during windows of time, then this is likely your top choice.
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