Lucy Day Werts answers “What is the best translation for the...”

Andronikos asked this question about War and Peace:

What is the best translation for the casual reader looking for a good story?

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 …morePeople 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...(less)

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