On 28-29 August, linguists and translators from Mexico, Germany, Italy, Finland, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Spain, Canada, India, and of course Russia gathered to take a new look at Tolstoy’s literary heritage.

Director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum, Vladimir Tolstoy, is the writer’s direct descendant. He calls the seminar of translators his ‘favorite project’. The VOR asked Vladimir Tolstoy to tell a few words about the event:

"I am very fond of our seminar because it brings together those people who in different countries are doing the same thing-they translate the Russian literature, and Leo Tolstoy`s works in particular, into their native languages. Very often they do not even know about each other, and their translations of War and Peace and Anna Karenina come out at the same time. So, we invite them to come to Russia to discuss the most interesting and challenging episodes for translation. This year, we are glad to welcome our guests from Great Britain, descendants of our prominent poet Boris Pasternak- Ann Pasternak and her husband, both are well-known translators, and Rosemarie Titse, a translator from Germany who has recently made a translation of Anna Karenina into German. We even toured Germany together with Rosemarie, reading extracts from the novel, in Russian and in German, and we were really successful."         

A few translators from Latin America also arrived to join the seminar. I should say, Leo Tolstoy’s novels, diaries and letters are very popular in Latin America nowadays.

Tolstoy’s works have been translated into dozens of languages for more than a century. Four new translations of his greatest epic novel, War and Peace, have been released in the past few years: in Great Britain, Japan and the United States. It does not mean however that the previous translations which were made during Tolstoy’s lifetime are outdated and cannot be trusted any longer. On the contrary, some of them can be even called authorized. Vladimir Tolstoy continues:

"Leo Tolstoy spoke several languages and thus could assess the quality of translation himself. He knew French perfectly, and had a very good command of English and German. Aylmer Maude, an English translator of Tolstoy’s works, knew the writer personally. He would come to Russia to work under Tolstoy’s guidance. So, translations by Maude were approved by Leo Tolstoy."

Leo Tolstoy remains one of the most popular writers worldwide. His War and Peace tops Newsweek’s Meta-list of 10 best books. When asked to comment on this, Vladimir Tolstoy said: “The world has become more cruel, and people are instinctively rejecting this, striving for something pure. And they find it in Tolstoy’s works, in the way he viewed the world”.       

source:  http://english.ruvr.ru