Lost in Translations

War and Peace" still looms large over the literary landscape, intimidating readers and writers much as it has for the last century and a half. Hemingway, as competitive as he was insecure, playfully talked about getting in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy. Henry James derided "War and Peace" as a "loose, baggy monster." Even Stalin—who never met an author he wasn't afraid to ban, jail or murder—knew better than to forbid Russians from reading "War and Peace." Over its lifetime, the book has become a yardstick for quality—and sometimes just a yardstick. "As long as 'War and Peace' ..." is a comparison understood even by people who have never cracked its covers. Reading it—or finishing it—has become a metaphor for accomplishment, and a funny metaphor at that, best expressed in Philip Roth's sly joke in "Goodbye, Columbus," when the narrator says he could always tell when it was summer because his cousin Doris was reading "War and Peace."

The thing about cultural fixtures is they're supposed to stay fixed. But "War and Peace" never stops surprising us. Currently two publishers are feuding over rival editions of a book that was published—well, the publication date is one of the things they're feuding about. Last month Ecco Press brought out a much shorter version of Tolstoy's masterpiece about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, translated by Andrew Bromfield. This edition constitutes Tolstoy's first attempt at the novel, which he published in 1866 in a Russian literary magazine. Tolstoy would spend another three years revising and enlarging his initial vision, ultimately producing the much longer novel familiar to modern readers. That is the version being published this month by Knopf and newly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the couple whose earlier translation of "Anna Karenina" became a best seller when Oprah Winfrey picked it as one of her book-club titles in 2004.

In the months leading up to publication, the two publishers took a few potshots at each other, with Knopf editor LuAnn Walther accusing Ecco of making "a serious mistake." Walther even asked Pevear to draft a response to the Ecco version. Lately both houses have scaled back the rhetoric. Daniel Halpern, Ecco's publisher, settled for saying in a recent interview that "anything that gets Tolstoy into the headlines has to be viewed as good news." Walther refuses to comment further on the fracas. "It's time to let the critics decide," she says. But she does address what is perhaps a more pertinent question for the general reader: why does the world need yet another translation of "War and Peace," and why now? "Because," she says after a long pause, "it's the greatest book ever written, and it's never been done like this before. Because all the previous translations left things out and got things wrong. Because it is a great moment to be reading Tolstoy, because we're at war. And because Richard and Larissa were willing to do it."

OK, an editor has to sell her book, but Walther isn't just blowing smoke. The Ecco edition is fascinating, but it would have been a true boon to scholars and fans of the novel had anyone thought to equip it with a longer introduction and some annotation. Instead, readers are left groping to understand what they are reading: the first draft of what would become "War and Peace." The Knopf edition, in contrast, comes laden with a long introduction by Pevear, heavy annotation, a historical glossary of people and places and a summary of the action. You don't need to read Russian to recognize that of the editions available in English, the Knopf edition is by far the one that most closely resembles literature.

To understand this fight—to grasp why anyone would get this passionate about a book—you're going to have to read it, because describing "War and Peace" to anyone who has never read it is like trying to describe an elephant to an Eskimo. We trot out the usual adjectives: sprawling, epic, historical romance and so on. Those descriptions aren't inaccurate, but neither do they capture the book's mesmerizing essence. What's forbidding about "War and Peace"—its length, its eccentricities (essays in the middle of a novel?), its Russianness—is also what makes it attractive. This enormous novel is like Mount Everest: it creates its own weather. Tolstoy's powers of invention beggar easy description, much less summary. Try imagining a Shakespeare play where, say, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Henry IV are all on the same stage at the same time.

But forget the stage. There is no proscenium arch with Tolstoy. He—and we—are everywhere at once. Birdlike, we peer at the Battle of Borodino, straining to see through the artillery smoke to the field of battle. Moments later we are striding up and down behind the Russian lines with Andrei Bolkonsky, and then a split second later we, like Bolkonsky, are frozen while we watch a spinning cannonball hiss and sputter at his feet. Rank has no privilege in Tolstoy's world. His portrait of Napoleon shows us a strutting fool puffed up with self-importance. But even when he doesn't like a character, the author takes pains to make him human. When we encounter Napoleon on the eve of battle, he is not plotting strategy but inspecting a newly painted portrait of his young son. He cannot sleep, not because he is excited about the coming battle but because he has a head cold.