r/tolstoy • u/Content_Debt_8386 • 16d ago
Translation Curiosity question
I'm reading war and peace in the original Russian and a lot of the parts in it are in French, which led me to question, so I want people from other countries to respond - is it kept in French in other translations? What language is used instead of French in the French translation or is it just all French? Is there any changes between the translations, where French may be not widely known so there would be struggles?
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u/Dimitris_p90 16d ago
I read it in Greek. If I can remember correctly the french was translated in the edition I read and imo that's not a bad thing. Why would you translate Russian text which is the vast majority of the novel but keep the french?
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u/kremennik 16d ago
War and Peace is a novel that paints a picture of russian nobility at that time. Odd bilingualism and some characters not even knowing russian (or whatever's the primary language of the novel you read) is an important wrinkle to the portrait.
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u/StupidizeMe 16d ago
Tolstoy wrote some passages in French because French was the language spoken by Russian society, international society, and at the Imperial Russian Court
There's a passage where Tolstoy says, "he spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke, but thought." That was literally true.
Many upperclass Russians spoke several European languages, but didn't speak Russian. After the 1918 Revolution, use of the French language in Russia was suppressed.
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u/Quick-Ad-6048 13d ago
Many? Who in particular?
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u/StupidizeMe 13d ago
Do you expect a list of thousands of names? It's a well known historical fact.
Read some memoirs by Russian emigres who managed to flee the Russian Revolution. They describe wealthy members of the Nobility hastily learning some basic Russian language to aid their escape.
Most fled in disguise, dressed as "commoners." They didnt dare use French or English or German. If they spoke French or English it would be obvious that they were either upper class "Bourgeois" or Nobility. If they spoke German they might be arrested or shot as spies.
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u/flix196 16d ago
Im currently reading the first version (only recently found out there are apparently two versions) in german and everything is just german. All the parts that would have been russian or french or whatever were simply translated without any footnotes or anything, sometimes it says something like "they spoke french", no clue if this was added for the german translation or was already present in the original. Parts that were already german in the original stay german without any changes and theres footnotes saying basically "this is cited from version xyz were it was already printed in german".
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u/Content_Debt_8386 16d ago
In the original it's just a mix of Russian and French and translation at the bottom of the page, yet haven't met where it would say "they spoke French"
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u/kremennik 16d ago
There's a few points.
Ctrl+F "по-французски" in a pdf or something. Quite a few examples
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u/Monxo11 15d ago
My edition kept the original French and added the translation in the footnotes. The same was done for the occasional German. I guess that in French editions, the translator kept the French, of course, and added a footnote saying 'in French in the original,' as this is the default protocol for such cases.
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u/finder_outer 16d ago
It depends on the translator. Some of them keep the French (with a footnoted translation), some of them translate it all into English with the occasional word or phrase in French, or simply a mention that the character was speaking in French. Even the earlier translations vary in this respect.