Warning: The magic method Preloader_Plus\Preloader_Plus::__wakeup() must have public visibility in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php on line 94 Warning: The magic method Preloader_Plus_Pro\Preloader_Plus_Pro::__wakeup() must have public visibility in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/preloader-plus-pro/inc/preloader-plus-pro.php on line 59 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/preloader-plus/inc/preloader-plus.php:94) in /customers/9/5/7/catherinebrown.org/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1768 {"id":854,"date":"2014-10-03T09:12:17","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T09:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/?page_id=854"},"modified":"2023-02-01T22:37:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T22:37:48","slug":"review-of-rosamund-bartletts-translation-of-anna-karenina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/review-of-rosamund-bartletts-translation-of-anna-karenina\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Rosamund Bartlett’s translation of ‘Anna Karenina’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anna Karenina<\/em>, Leo Tolstoy, trans. Rosamund Bartlett\u00a0(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 847 pp, \u00a318.99<\/p>\n

[N.B. This review appeared in\u00a0The Independent<\/em> on Wednesday 1st October 2014, p. 38. What follows is a pre-edited version.]<\/p>\n

The appetite of English-speakers for Anna Karenina <\/em>has been well-served. There have been twelve translations since Nathan Haskell Dole\u2019s of 1886, four in this millennium, and two in this year. Bartlett\u2019s is a particularly generous helping, with its explanatory notes and wide-reaching introduction. Bartlett takes the line that, despite the important differences between Anna\u2019s story and Levin\u2019s, \u2018everything in the novel is interconnected and contributes in some way to its central theme\u2019. She doesn\u2019t, though, state what that theme actually is. Neither the poignant parallels and transitions between the novel\u2019s stories, nor the Leitmotifs and characters uniting them, alter the fact that Anna\u2019s story is ultimately about what to do (or not do) if you fall in love with someone who isn\u2019t your spouse, whilst Levin\u2019s is ultimately about why you should live at all (even if happily married), given that you will one day die. Anna can\u2019t begin to perceive this question, which provoked Tolstoy\u2019s own crisis at the time of writing the novel, because her romantic problems obscure it. Nor does Bartlett reveal her hand on who she thinks condemns Anna to death: God, a hypocritical society, Anna herself, or Tolstoy; though she rightly notes that Tolstoy shouldn\u2019t be dismissed as a simple misogynist.<\/p>\n

Her translation takes particular care with the specialist vocabulary such as, I confess, I not only have to look up when reading the Russian, but when reading English translations (\u2018the woodcock are roding\u2019, Bartlett tells us, helpfully glossing that \u2018the spring courtship flight at dawn and dusk of the male woodcock\u2019 \u2018is known in English as \u201croding\u201d\u2019). Overall, her translation is closer to the Russian in terms of sentence structure (often multi-clausal), and register, than are those of Constance Garnett, the Maudes, and Rosemary Edmonds. But it is less so than that of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and her English is correspondingly more idiomatic than theirs. Like them, but unlike Dole, Garnett, and Edmonds, she doesn\u2019t attempt to render Russian peasant dialect. She translates \u2018muzhik\u2019 as \u2018peasant\u2019, and retains Russian only for the best-known and least-translatable words such as \u2018dacha\u2019. Like her predecessors, she slides over some of Tolstoy\u2019s archaisms. Levin claims that his life will have the meaning of good which he is \u2018vlasten\u2019 (empowered<\/em>) to put into it; Bartlett\u2019s Levin simply \u2018has\u2019 \u2018the power\u2019. Again, like her predecessors, she says that the candle representing Anna\u2019s life \u2018went out for ever\u2019. But \u2018navsegda potukhla\u2019 is \u2018forever went out\u2019. At such a moment, it matters whether \u2018forever\u2019, or extinguishing, ends the chapter.<\/p>\n

But this is a fine new translation, of which the scholarship demonstrates Bartlett\u2019s considerable knowledge of the author. It is a welcome contribution to the ongoing life of this enigmatic, divided, passionate work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, trans. Rosamund Bartlett\u00a0(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 847 pp, \u00a318.99 [N.B. This review appeared in\u00a0The Independent on Wednesday 1st October 2014, p. 38. What follows is a pre-edited version.] The appetite of English-speakers for Anna Karenina has been well-served. There have been twelve translations since Nathan Haskell Dole\u2019s of 1886, four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4300,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[234],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4301,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions\/4301"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}