Newsweek Declares Winner in War and Peace Skirmish

When Publishers Weekly wrote about the dueling translations of War and Peace out this season last week, the article was an effective recap of the war of words that’s been raging for the last two months between Knopf and Ecco, ever since Knopf editor LuAnn Walther dismissed her competition’s version as “a first draft” as opposed to “the real thing.” Mind you, the comparison isn’t entirely inaccurate, but it is a bit cruel—it might be more charitable to think of Ecco’s version, translated by Andrew Bromfield, as the “demo tape,” where you can hear the core of the songs before the production kicks in, but even that’s an oversimplified metaphor. Leon Neyfakh at the NY Observer provided a quick backstory on Ecco’s “original” version (along with the trenchant observation from one Russian scholar that this whole debate is “purely commercial bullshit”).

After Walther’s remarks were followed with an attack from Richard Pevear, the co-translator on the Knopf edition, Ecco’s Daniel Halpern had had enough, and he struck back, accusing Pevear of attacking a marketing campaign rather than Bromfield’s actual translation work, then observes that “Mr. Pevear doesn’t actually read the original Russian.” (Again, not inaccurate, but not kind, either.) And now Newsweek enters the fray, as book critic Malcolm Jones determines that while “the Ecco edition is fascinating [...], the Knopf edition is by far the one that most closely resembles literature.” And, therefore, Jones spends most of his time talking to Pevear and his wife-collaborator, Larissa Volokhonsky, about their approach to the novel.

Of course, one critic’s opinion isn’t going to be enough to end the battle; we can look forward to an entire fusillade of similar articles from just about every major American magazine and newspaper book review section in the weeks ahead.

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