“Were I the Author of This Tale”

Tolstoy As Translator
“Were I the Author of This Tale” is the first book-length study to focus on Tolstoy’s translations (from English, French, German, and Ancient Greek) and the representations of translation in his fiction.

“Were I the Author of This Tale” foregrounds Tolstoy’s lifelong habit of intervening in the work of others. Tolstoy’s work as an editor, commentator, anthologizer, re-writer, and especially translator began in his youth and kept him busy long after he had repudiated his own fiction. And yet this middleman – who co-founded the Intermediary publishing house, who wrote reams of letters to the authors he translated and to his own translators, who competed with the church to produce an authoritative translation of the Gospels – was distressed by the theoretical and practical necessity of mediation. Even as he translated, he yearned for a world in which God’s word would reach believers, just as an author’s words would reach audiences, without mediators.

This book focuses on the tension created when Tolstoy’s compulsive need to speak for others confronts his conviction that universal literature speaks for itself. Caught in this paradox, Tolstoy produced a literary corpus that acknowledged the necessity of mediation while indulging in deep suspicions about interlingual translation. His translations, and fictional representations of translation, are frustrated attempts to deny his own mediating activity; but as Tolstoy seeks to hide, circumvent, and minimize the realities of life after Babel, he enriches contemporary theories of translation and becomes, despite himself, a translation theorist in his own right.

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