![]() Rosemary Edmonds, who translated the novel for the Penguin edition in 1954, is more muted. Always, in Pevear and Volokhonsky’s version, we feel the physicality of Tolstoy’s details. But Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English, and their superb rendering allows us, as perhaps never before, to grasp the palpability of Tolstoy’s "characters, acts, situations.". Great translations age, while great novels merely mature, and it would be valuable to have even an ordinary contemporary English version of Tolstoy’s book. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Strakhov, written at the same time as "Anna Karenina," he argued that his writings were not collections of ideas that could be abstracted from the text but a network: "This network itself is not made up of ideas (or so I think), but of something else, and it is absolutely impossible to express the substance of this network directly in words: it can be done only indirectly, by using words to describe characters, acts, situations.". Tolstoy himself was forced into paradox when defending his work. BOOKS lead review of "Anna Karenina" (Viking $40) by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
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