Translating Tolstoy: A Conversation

Text and interview by Bob Blaisdell

The outstanding Russian to English translator Nicolas Pasternak Slater is a retired hematologist and the nephew of the famed Soviet author Boris Pasternak. His wife, the writer Maya Slater, is a scholar of and translator of French literature. They live in London.

As I was preparing last month to review Nicolas Pasternak Slater’s new translation for Pushkin Press of Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Tales – an early work based on Tolstoy’s experiences as an officer in the Crimean War during the French and British siege of the Black Sea port city in 1854-55, I learned of the Slaters’ translation of Anna Karenina, publishing this year by the Folio Society. They agreed to meet with me (I’m in New York) on Zoom. In mid-June we discussed their method of joint translation; Sevastopol Tales; Boris Pasternak; and Tolstoy’s connection to the Pasternak family.

Bob Blaisdell:  I do want to talk about Sevastopol Tales, but my biggest interest has always been Anna Karenina, and so maybe we could start there, and how you two took it on?

Maya Slater: We were asked. The publisher said, “Will you consider doing this? It’s my favorite novel.”

Nicolas Pasternak Slater: And it was something of our favorite novel too. We’re very fond of it. Although we hadn’t read it for many, many years before coming back to it to translate it.

BB: And what was that experience like – coming back to this great book? Were there surprises for you?

MS: Endless surprises on every page! I mean, it’s a completely different thing, as you well know, translating, where you can’t skip over anything. You can’t just say, “Well, this is not such an interesting passage. Let’s look at the really good bits.” Because the “really-not-so-good-bits,” as you thought, turn out to be absolutely full of treasures.

NPS: In my case, I had read it and studied it fairly carefully at the age of 20, 21 – which is 66 years later now, when I came back to it. So it was all absolutely new. It was full of surprises, as Maya says, full of surprises on every page. I remembered the outlines of the story, and that was about it.

BB: Did you read it through first, or did you immediately go to work?

NPS: We read it bit by bit as we were translating.

MS: We rather arrogantly thought, “We both read this before anyway.” And also once you start reading it, you’re so gripped that you really want to go in deep into that very first episode with Prince Oblonsky not noticing which bed he’s in. He’s trying to get out of bed the wrong way because he’s forgotten that he’s sleeping on the settee rather than in his own bed.

NPS: Yes. And it’s interesting in retrospect because that opening has leads into so many different aspects of what is going to come.

BB: Were you doing a chapter or two a day? What was your routine?

NPS: Nothing like that. Much less. The way we work is that, as Russian is almost my native language, I took on the initial translation, bit by bit, page by page and, in fact, emailed it to Maya, who would look at it and – well, over to you.

MS: My ambition was to make it sound like English. I regard myself as an English writer, and so I would take anything that seemed in the least like translationese or uncomfortable or unsteady, and I would pounce on that and we would work it all out until we reached an agreement.

NPS: We tried to work on it a bit every day. I would translate something every day, aiming more or less for what would now be between a page and two pages of the printed version, and email it to Maya. On the whole, every day or every other day, we would sit down together and have a session. I would email Maya with the English version, and she would underline bits that she wanted to discuss. We would sit down together and go back to the Russian, because Maya speaks Russian, but isn’t as happy with reading it or isn’t as fluent in Russian as I am.

MS: I’m a specialist in French literature. That’s my job. Or was my job.

BB: You’re a very experienced translator yourself. [Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and Other Plays (Oxford World’s Classics) and another forthcoming volume of Moliere.]

MS: In fact, we’ve been doing this for some time, because we did Doctor Zhivago [by Boris Pasternak] as well. So what I saw as my job was to make it seem as though it was English.

BB: When is it going to be available to non-Folio Society readers?

NPS: To non-Folio readers, that’s a second question. But the first question you should be asking is, “Is it going to be available in an affordable edition from Folio?” Because they’ve published a limited edition, a luxury edition, this marvelous volume. But it will come out in a two-volume edition for an affordable price. It’ll still be more expensive than a paperback. It’ll be a hardback bound and illustrated book. So it would be something in the region of $100 maybe, but that’s not out of the way for a high-quality book. And beyond that, we have the option of licensing it to someone who will publish it in paperback, and that will be in about four years’ time, I should think. The affordable standard edition should be out sometime around the end of this year.

BB: At any point, did you look at other translations?

NPS: We did look at other translations. Pretty much when we had settled on our own version, we looked at other people’s to see what they had done. Very rarely we took ideas from them. Mostly, I’m afraid in our conceit, we thought that our ideas were better.

BB:  Naturally! Was there any particular one that you most liked?

MS: I think there’s one thing that everybody did and that we didn’t, which was a problem, and that was that they turned the text into a Victorian novel, and we didn’t want to do that. We wanted it to be something more readable – without that feeling of going right back in the past and making a bit of effort. It’s a bit as if we were reading Trollope or Dickens, that sort of thing. And so we wanted to avoid that, and everybody else actually is much more classical than we are. [To Nicolas] Do give that example about the conversation with Anna, which is she’s saying, “You, you alone, are to blame.”

NPS: Yes. Maya’s quoting Anna in her fury, saying to Vronsky, “You, you alone, are to blame for everything.” And that’s good Victorian English, but it’s not what a real person today would say. And so in our version that came out as, “It’s all your fault! All of it!” And that exemplifies what we’re trying to do. When Tolstoy wrote it, he wrote it in the vernacular of the time, and we’re translating this more or less into the vernacular of our time. We try to stick to the cultured language of today.

BB: Your uncle Boris, Nicolas, was a prolific translator – from English to Russian.

NPS: As a translator of Shakespeare, he was very, very free. He more or less read the passage, re-thought it, turned it into excellent verse – if it was supposed to be verse – and wrote it. It sounds as much like Pasternak as it does like Shakespeare. He’s trying to produce the same effect, but starting from a different standpoint, the Russian language.

BB: How did he learn English?

NPS: He had a good pre-revolutionary education. He was more or less bilingual in Russian and German. He studied quite a lot in Germany, but then, on the way, he also acquired English and French, and he was able to express himself in both those languages.

MS: So one thing that’s fascinating about the people in Anna Karenina – the 19th century Russians were so cultured. There’s masses of English, masses of French, and Oblonsky, in fact, quotes a poem in German.

NPS: I think Tolstoy rather enjoyed showing off his knowledge of languages… Leaping sideways for a moment to the Sevastopol Tales. We have whole passages in Polish, and then passages of proper French spoken by French soldiers, and poor French spoken by the Russians.

MS: I must say that his French is absolutely magnificent. So idiomatic, you know, so flowing, so elegant.

BB: Oh, that’s very good to know. There’s a passage where a Russian’s making do with the tiny, tiny bit of French that he knows, talking with one of the French soldiers.

“Joli,” says the officer, guided through this conversation not so much by his own ideas as by the French words he knows.

That’s where the conversation has to go for him with his very limited French, and that was sometimes my experience in Russia when I used to visit. There are many passages in Sevastopol Tales that are marvelous. I hadn’t read the Sevastopol Tales for a long time, and the three stories are so different from one another. I was especially impressed by the first one, “Sevastopol in December.” I think that was the one that Tolstoy had the most feeling through — written with the strongest immediate impulse.

NPS: It’s a wonderful introduction, seeing the town and crossing, the waterway to the north side, and the way that life goes on in this relatively quiet area.

On the North Side, the daytime bustle slowly dispels the calm of night. Here a relief detachment of sentries marches by with a clatter of muskets; there a doctor is already hurrying to the hospital; further on, a soldier scrambles out of his dugout to splash his sunburnt face with icy water; turns towards the reddening east, hurriedly crosses himself and says a prayer; over there a tall, cumbersome camel-drawn madzhara creaks its way to the cemetery where its load of bloody corpses, piled almost to the top, will be buried… You walk on to the quay, where you are assailed by that peculiar smell of coal, manure, damp and beef; thousands of random objects – firewood, meat, gabions, flour, iron, and the like – lie in heaps by the quayside; soldiers from different regiments mill around, and without their kitbags and guns, smoking, swearing at one another, and manhandling heavy loads onto the steamer which is moored by the quayside with its steam up; small boats for hire, loaded with all sorts of passengers – soldiers, sailors, merchants, women – moor and cast off from the quayside.

I was very impressed by that. I love it as a beginning.

BB: I marvel again and again and again at what he’s able to do. One of the great passages, which I was also hoping that you would read, starts on page 85.

NPS: “He remembered the twelve roubles he owed Mikhailov, and another debt he owed in Petersburg which he ought to have paid long ago. A gypsy tune he had been humming that evening came back to him. The woman he loved came to his mind in her bonnet with lilac ribbons, and a man who had insulted him five years ago and whom he had never paid back. But along with these and thousands of other memories, he never lost for an instance his awareness of the present and his expectation of horror and death.”

BB: Oh, my gosh!

NPS: That’s Praskukhin’s death.

BB:  The memories are happening and he is simultaneously being in the present.

NPS: This stream of consciousness writing, Tolstoy was a great exponent of it. I don’t suppose he invented it, but he was really at home in it.

BB: He perfected it.

NPS: I’m thinking of Anna Karenina’s last ride through the town, thinking rude thoughts about Vronsky and thinking thoughts about all the people she sees doing things in the street. You remember that part?

BB: Yes. Despising even the kids eating ice cream.

NPS: Yes, that’s right – “dirty ice cream.”

BB: Anna’s suicide feels like part of my own experience. But the inner experience of death of Praskukhin’s is only matched for me by Hadji Murat’s death in that novella. There’s plenty of death in Tolstoy.

NPS: Tolstoy was horrified or obsessed by the idea of death, and the actual process of dying – he describes it so many times. I translated a book of Tolstoy short stories [The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories], where you have the death of Ivan Ilyich, and you also have the Master and Workman, and the death of the master. Tolstoy’s very keen on following every instant of the process.

BB: As you’re a doctor, I meant to ask you about this too. When Tolstoy’s describing death or he’s describing medical procedures – for example the terrifying amputations in Sevastopol Tales – does he seem accurate as far as your professional expertise goes?

NPS: As far as I can professionally judge, yes, he does. But my experience as a doctor of all these things is, of course, quite different. I mean, I have seen people die during an operation, for instance, where the operation went wrong, and I was watching the surgeon say, “Oh, God. Oh, blast it.” And the surgeon was in a real mess because he had done something wrong, and he didn’t know how to retrieve it. And the patient died… I have no idea what the patient’s experience was. And of course, I have sat with patients who were dying in the normal course of events, and there you watch someone going through this – it’s very moving. I was going to say it’s the same every time – well, of course, it isn’t the same every time. It’s unique every time. But death is a very big thing when it happens in front of you. It’s not a trivial event.

BB: I believe you. Did you ever write fiction? I know Maya has written fiction [The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy]. Did you ever try your hand at fiction?

NPS: When I was very young, but I didn’t like what I produced, and I haven’t done it for decades, so essentially the answer is no. I love it when Maya does it.

BB: How did you choose to do Sevastopol Tales?

NPS: That was not my choice. It was the publisher’s, Pushkin Press, who knew me and came to me with this offer. I was thrilled to do it, and even more so when I read the Sevastopol Tales. I hadn’t read them before.

BB: And what’s your next project?

NPS: Folio Society has suggested to us that we might produce a volume of Chekhov short stories. And we’re absolutely thrilled with that. I have done a small edition of Chekhov short stories.

BB: The Beauties is the best little volume of Chekhov there is.

NPS: Oh, thank you. This time it would be a Folio Society book, and so it would be much bigger.

BB: Oh, wonderful. I look forward to that.

MS: Well, there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before that happens.

BB: And with Anna Karenina, is there a translator’s note?

MS:  Yes. I did the intro. But I had a particular reason wanting to do it, which was that we had a lot of personal stuff to put in.

BB: For instance?

MS: Yasnaya Polyana [Tolstoy’s estate], and then the family connection to Tolstoy, which was very important for us. You know Nicolas’s grandfather, the painter Leonid Pasternak, was a great admirer of Tolstoy, and a great, very, very close friend of his. And so, that meant a lot to us, and I put it in.

NPS: Leonid Pasternak, the artist, joined a competition to provide illustrations for War and Peace, and he produced about half a dozen, which got published at the time. And it was on seeing those – I mean, Tolstoy had had nothing to do with that choice – but when he saw what Leonid Pasternak had done, he commissioned him to do the illustrations for his next novel, which was Resurrection. They became great friends. They were such friends that he was in fact the artist chosen to paint Tolstoy on his death bed.

BB: I’m very grateful to you both for making time to talk about this.