Fair copy -
CLARENCE BROWN
The Law of Love and the Law of Violence Leo Tolstoy, translated by Mary Koutouzow Tolstoy. With a Foreword by Baroness Budberg (Anthony Blond 25s)
Like countless Russian books, this one has a bizarre bibliography. Tolstoy wrote it in 1908, two years before the end of his long life. It is a tract against organised religion and organised government—specifically, the official Russian version of Christianity and the Russian version of autocracy. It is well- disposed towards socialism, communism and anarchy for what Tolstoy took to be their affinity with primitive Christianity. It calls on exploited classes to stop collaborating in their own exploitation. It will not greatly enlarge anyone's knowledge of Tolstoy's familiar pleas for non-violence, non-resis- tance to evil, temperance, chastity and uni- versal .brotherhood; but it is a handy re- minder of why this incorrigible old man was in his single person a 'third force' in Russia -on a footing with church and state and despising both.
Naturally, the first full Russian text had to be published abroad—in 1909 and, as it chances, in Christchurch, Hants, under the emigre imprint of 'Free World'. This was tilled with errors and misprints. A French translation by Tolstoy's friend E. Halperine- Kaminsky, who was working from the manu- script itself, appeared in Paris soon after it was written. The first really full and reliable Russian text was finally printed by the Soviet editors of the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy's works in 1956.
The curious publication history of this work has now been continued in London in a way that reflects little credit upon those involved. Tolstoy's pamphlet—he himself always called it an 'article'—has been made into a book of 101 pages selling for 25 shil- lings. The foreword is unhelpful, to say the least. The quality of the translation may be judged by the first words made to come from Tolstoy's mouth: 'The only reason why I am writing this is because . . .' It is, how- ever, not the style of the translation but its provenance that justifies the word 'curious'.
For it is. in a certain sense, not a trans- lation of Tolstoy at all but a translation of a translation of Tolstoy—that by Hal- perine-Kaminsky, whose help goes un- acknowledged. If it is true that much is lost in translation (and it is), then I leave it to the reader to calculate what he must forgo under these circumstances.
Whether the word plagiarism can be applied to the case of one translation being cribbed from another is beyond me.
Obviously, one original will yield more or
less the same copy by any route. The crux is the matter of error, from which no transla- tion is free; and the onus probandi is upon those who must explain how chance alone
might account for one identical error after another. Truth is one, but error is legion. It is unlikely that a person translating from the original would fortuitously duplicate Hal- perine-Kaminsky's French error of making the English economist John Morrison David- son, who corresponded with Tolstoy and is
quoted by him, into 'Maurice Davidson'. The title of Tolstoy's manuscript is The Law of Violence and the Law of Love. Kaminsky— who knows why?—reversed it into La Loi de /'amour et la loi de la violence. And that is what we have here. Surely a translator working from the original would have got the title right.
In certain cases, Kaminsky's help is provi- dential. When Flaubert read Tolstoy, he was scandalised: `11.se repelte!' he exclaimed, 'll philosophise!' Precisely. But Flaubert was speaking of the fiction of Tolstoy's greatest period. Toward the end of his life, when the Sage of Yasnaya Polyana turned more and more to straight exhortation, open letters, pamphleteering and homilies on all the multi- tudinous public questions that seemed inevit- ably to find their way to his desk, the style did occasionally clot into an inert mass of repetitious sentences as long as Russian winter. This brief work has several styles. There is even one straightforward narrative that reminds one of scenes in Resurrection. But the opening is stylistically nearly impene- trable. The thought is simple to the point of plainness. but when the fit of rhetoric was upon him, Tolstoy could make simple things very complex indeed.
Halperine-Kaminsky, cloaked in all the authority of discipleship, dissolves this grume into a French of admirable liquidity. He breaks Tolstoy's immense sentences down into syntactic portions that glide more com- fortably into the Western mind—a procedure that demands much of the translator's judg- ment and taste. The translator of the book before us takes all of her predecessor's de- cisions one by one and turns them into Eng- lish. Under the circumstances, it is perhaps a total gain for the reader that nothing more strenuous was undertaken. I think it is not a gain for the reader, however, to be told that he is reading Tolstoy when he is in fact reading an English copy of a French refashioning of Tolstoy.
The publisher need hardly stress the topi- cality of this book, which is evidently aimed at the 'protest' market. But the blurb deserves citation for its unconscious hilarity: 'Here is pacifism presented with no holds barred . . Again: `. . . we have suffered for so long out of neglect of the basic Christianity we have turned our backs on like dogs returning to their vomit' But I am in favour of entrepreneurial publishing. Be- sides, no excuse has to be made for publish- ing Tolstoy, even such marginal ephemera as this. And something of his cracked old voice, the blend of Old Testament fury and evan- gelic compassion, comes even through the present work. But it is saddening to think that a readership of earnest, and mostly
young, people are to be offered a text of such moral purity under conditions that greatly diminish it—conditions, moreover, of which they can scarcely be aware.
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