War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [6]
…thought Prince Andrei, waiting among many significant and insigificant persons in Count Arakcheev’s anteroom.
During his service, mostly as an adjutant, Prince Andrei had seen many anterooms of significant persons, and the differing characters of these anterooms were very clear to him. Count Arakcheev’s anteroom had a completely special character. The insignificant persons waiting in line for an audience in Count Arakcheev’s anteroom…
Without mentioning the parallel play on “significant and insignificant persons,” Christian notes that the Russian word priémnaya (“anteroom”) recurs five times in as many lines, and that the Maude translation (1927) glosses over that fact by omitting the word once and using three different words for the rest. I will add that in Ann Dunnigan’s translation (1968) the repetitions are treated in exactly the same way as in the Maudes’ that Anthony Briggs, in his 2005 version, omits the repeated word twice and varies it twice; while Constance Garnett (1904) omits it once, but otherwise keeps the repetitions. This passage is a fairly restrained example of what I have called Tolstoy’s “signature style,” but it does illustrate how the balance and rhythm of his prose depend on repetition. These qualities are lost when the general principle of avoiding repetitions is mechanically applied to it. Tolstoy also had a fondness for larger rhetorical structures based on repeated triads of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. We have made it a point to keep his repetitions, as well as other devices of formal rhetoric (for instance, chiasmus) that Tolstoy consciously used and that his translators have often ignored. Tolstoy once boasted that in writing War and Peace he had used every rhetorical device of the old Latin grammarians, which means they are not there by chance.
The other extreme of Tolstoy’s style is exemplified by the short sentence (the shortest in War and Peace) that I have already quoted: “Drops dripped.” It is the first sentence of a paragraph made up of four brief, staccato sentences, four quite ordinary observations, which acquire a lyrical intensity owing solely to the sound and rhythm of the words: Kápli kápali. Shyól tíkhii góvor. Lóshadi zarzháli i podrális. Khrapél któ-to. “Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.” It is a night scene, and one of the most haunting moments in the book. Other English versions translate the first sentence as “The branches dripped,” “The trees were dripping,” or, closer to the Russian, “Raindrops dripped.” They all state a fact instead of rendering a sound, which (by a stroke of translator’s luck) comes out almost the same in English as in Russian.
Here is another example of the same stylistic compactness, this time expressing a psychological insight rather than a sense impression. It describes the moment when Natasha, who has almost cut herself off from all life, suddenly has to take care of her grief-stricken mother. Tolstoy says simply: Prosnúlas lyubóv, i prosnúlas zhízn. “Love awoke, and life awoke.” All that Tolstoy leaves unsaid about Natasha’s inner life in these few words is implied by their very matter-of-factness, expressed in the exact rhetorical balance of the phrasing. Other English versions read: “Love was awakened, and life waked with it,” “Love awoke, and so did life,” or “When love reawakened, life reawakened.” They convey the same general meaning, but hardly the same sense as the original.
A final example. Tolstoy describes children playing in their room when their mother comes in: Dyéti na stúlyakh yékhali v Moskvú i priglasíli yeyó s sobóyu. “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and