Quote:
Originally Posted by Bromley
I'd have to chip in and say I think it's the greatest novel ever written as well. It's hard to explain why, though, if you haven't read it, because it's not necessarily a plot-driven book.
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I tried to read it years and years ago under the misguided belief that I
had to. Needless to say, I didn't get too far. At the time though, I had a pinch less knowledge about that time period than I do now, by which I mean I still have none. One day, perhaps, I will come to it, as I quite enjoyed Tolstoy's smaller
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, and have both
Anna Karenina and
Resurrection on my shelves.
On the subject of translating
War And Peace, I remember seeing a webcast of a talk Umberto Eco was doing at Harvard on translation, around the time
Baudolino was released. He talked about how, because of the passages of French, there could not be a satisfactory translation to French of
War And Peace, in the same way that an English translation can use those French passages, or a Chinese translation could translate the French to English. Rather complicated, but I'm sure he went into it in more detail in his book about translation as negotiation:
Mouse Or Rat?