"...stepping off the ferry, [Prince Andrei] looked at the sky Pierre had pointed to, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, eternal sky he had seen as he lay on the battlefield, and something long asleep, something that was best in him, suddenly awakened joyful and young in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei re-entered the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life."
- Leo Tolstoy (II.2.xii)
Day Count: 32
Page Count: 390
The first month of Project Tolstoy is over and much progress has been made! Thank you all for your contribution to making this blog great! I couldn't have gotten this far without you! Enjoy this post that I've been working on for the past week!
Right after I started this blog, my friend Kyle (of Unraveling Ulysses) asked me some specifics about the translation of War and Peace I'm reading - font, size, binding, etc. Rather than answer his questions in a comment, I decided to dedicate an entire post to answering his question... along with introducing some of the other tools I use on a daily basis in my reading and study.
The Book
As a Greek minor in college, I know that often times, translations have little of the specificity and nuance of the original text, which is why the best way to read a work is in the original language. As I wanted to read War and Peace before the end of the year, I had neither the time nor - let's be honest - the inclination to learn the entirety of the Russian language. Having researched a number of translations, I decided on this one for a few reasons:
(1.) It's the latest translation currently available on the market (released in 2007 - Andrew Bromfield's translation came out earlier the same year), which says a lot for its overall accessibility. I would not necessarily need to sit down with a dictionary or a thesaurus at hand, waiting for an archaic or out-of-use word before I flung the other book open and began my feverish hunt for a definition. It was written in something as close to the vernacular as possible.
(2.) The Pevear/Volokhonsky combo has already made a name for themselves in the literary community with their translations of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Not only were those translations widely said to be quite readable, but they also had a unique way of translating that took into account a lot of the nuance of the original Russian text.
(3.) My department head told me that his wife had received a call from her old college professor shortly after this translation was made available saying that she "had to read it." It had renewed his excitement for a book he knew all to well. That, for me, was the final piece - I needed this translation.
After I received this translation, I began to notice that there were a lot of other wonderful things about this book:
- The French: When War and Peace was originally written, Tolstoy wrote a vast majority of the book in Russian. However, there was a percentage of the text (something like 1% or 2%) that was originally written in French. While I have discussed my thoughts on Tolstoy's use of French already, I found it interesting that Pevear and Volokhonsky opted not to translate the French into English in the main body of the text, as most (if not all) other English translations have done. (Instead, the pair translate the French at the bottom of the page in footnotes - sometimes for pages at a time, which can get interesting.) I found this immensely helpful (especially considering that Tolstoy doesn't always mention that characters are speaking in French unless he himself is writing in Russian) in figuring out which characters are speaking and in understanding just how immersed in French culture the Russian people were at this point in history.
- Endnotes, Appendices, and Indexes: Pevear and Volokhonsky clearly did their research for this text, providing over fifty pages of supplementary material, including chapter summaries, exhaustive endnotes useful for providing context, an index providing information on the real life characters in War and Peace, and even Tolstoy's own thoughts on the book. At first, it was a bit daunting having to switch back and forth from the main text to the endnotes, but after the addition of a second bookmark, I find I barely notice anymore. These tools are fantastically useful for the casual reader like myself.
- The Difference is Readability: One of the best things about this edition of War and Peace is the ease of reading. The typeface is an easily-recognizable Times New Roman in a medium-sized font that is just right for my eyes. Not too big as to be ludicrous, but not too small to involve squinting or cartoonishly large magnifying glasses.
The book itself is paperback. Generally, I prefer hardcovers - particularly for classic books like this, as they look so pretty on my bookshelf - but I opted for the trade paperback for the purposes of portability. "Portability," I suppose, is something of a subjective term in this case, as the book is 6"x4"x1.5" and weighs roughly two-and-a-half to three pounds. It's not always conducive to lugging around under my arm wherever I go, but it does fit nicely in my computer case for my treks to and from school, Panera, Mom & Dad's... wherever!
The Notes
I've been a fan of Moleskine journals since the first time I started working at Barnes & Noble back in 2006. I loved the aesthetic of them - the sleek black cover, the heavy (but not too heavy) lined pages, and the professional vibe that it gave off to those around me. As if to say, "Back off, pal! I'm a writer/thinker!" So, needless to say, I have several Moleskines laying around my apartment, many of them half-full (or half-empty for all you Andrei-esque pessimists out there!) of thoughts, story ideas, random doodles, quotes... you name it, I probably scribbled it into a Moleskine at some point!
When I began teaching a Comparative Religions class at the high school where I work, my department head (that man of wit and wisdom who started me on this journey in the first place) recommended that I have my students record their thoughts in these journals, as a sort of commonplace book. I found myself using one as well and thought it to be a most worthwhile exercise for organizing my thoughts and making a note of quotes, ideas, and lists of various sorts. (In an effort to decorate my commonplace book, I placed an old Superman window sticker I'd gotten years ago on the cover. It looks pretty rad, as you can see below.)
The Internet
Honestly, it almost goes without saying, but two of the most important tools in my ongoing reading of Tolstoy remain both this blog and my Twitter feed, @TweetingTolstoy (which appears on the right-hand side of this blog). This blog, as I mentioned at the very beginning, is a means of keeping me accountable - hence the day and page counts at the beginning of every post - and really helps me digest and process a lot of the various things I'm thinking about while reading War and Peace. My Twitter feed, thanks to the magic of cellular telephones, gets updated far more frequently (including just a second ago). Mainly, it allows me to record small blurbs of text that I want to share when I'm not near my blog or the Internet. Still, in this digital age, I'm using the Internet to my full advantage in my Tolstoy reading!
The E-book (sorry, B&N - I can't bring myself to use 'nookbook'...)
For my birthday last fall, I bought myself (with some generous contributions from my parents and my sister) a Nook, Barnes & Noble's e-reader - comparable, but in my mind, better than the Kindle. (This was, of course, five months or so before the release of the Nook Color, so I'm stuck in black and white, but that's no big deal - I'm not that picky.)
Since getting my Nook, I've enjoyed reading all sorts of texts on it, including (but not limited to) a number of Kurt Vonnegut texts like Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Mother Night. When I got it into my head to start reading War and Peace, though, I was sure that I wanted the feel of the book in my hands (I suppose as a way of legitimizing the experience) and, at that point, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation wasn't available for the Nook yet.
However, still being a big fan of my Nook, I wanted to use it somewhere in the process. So, when I decided that I needed something to help supplement my reading of War and Peace, I looked no further than Sparknotes!
Barnes & Noble owns Sparknotes and they have a wide variety of teaching tools available for all manner of topics (not just literature). I've never been a big fan of reading guides (except the time I needed to read Pride and Prejudice in high school), but I thought that a book with literally hundreds of characters and all manner of settings would require I find some additional assistance.
I'll be honest - as yet, I've not really needed this all that much. I estimate that I may change my mind once I get to the part of the book where Tolstoy begins talking at length about his thoughts of the nature of time and history, but until then, I'm having no trouble following both the arc and the scope of the story. Consider this e-book my back-up plan!
The Pencil
I had a number of teachers in high school (many of whom I've had the privilege to work alongside in the last few years I've been a teacher) who insisted that, in order to be a good reader, I needed to carry a some manner of writing utensil along with me at all times in order to write in whatever I was reading. (I have always preferred pencil to pen or highlighter, as I feel that, once I have hold of something permanent, Murphy's Law dictates that I'm bound to make a mistake!) This is a rule of thumb I followed all through college on theology and philosophy texts - a number of my books have all sorts of pencil markings in them - but never thought to apply to fiction until within that last few years.
Since then, I've been unstoppable! The last several fiction texts I've read - The Magnificent Ambersons, East of Eden, and To Kill a Mockingbird, to name a few - have all been subject to the mighty blows from my pencil of justice!
I prefer Bic mechanical pencils, as those are the ones I've been using since high school. I like using the 0.5mm leads as well, as it gives me more precision when I'm writing things down. Typically, I run out of those fairly quickly and have to end up using the 0.7mm leads, but I'm generally okay with that. My pencil is, generally speaking, the one thing I am never without, making it an indispensable tool in my literary arsenal!
The End
So... that's probably far more information than you wanted to know about my reading habits, but there it is! Hopefully this gives you some insight into my thoughts and attitudes about reading and about what goes into writing a post for "Tackling Tolstoy"! Thanks for reading, true believers! We'll see you next time (whereupon I will have cracked the 400-page mark - BELIEVE IT!)!
