Uneducated

[larryhammer]

I must say, if someone had told me that Anna Karenina is funny, I would have gotten to it sooner. (Not that that Book-A-Minute summary captures the humor very well.) Everyone acts like it's all serious, but it's an even better blend of comic and serious than Middlemarch, which sometimes gets too mordant for perfect flavor.

---L.

Comments

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

The English version "Anna Karenin" (no Russian suffixes allowed in a proper translation,) loses a lot of Tolstoy's mordant ironic prose style.

It is not "Bridget Jonina's Diary" but Tolstoy's prose style always struck me as having more in common with Edith Wharton, (the last great American writer to really understand irony,) than with cranky-pants Dostoyevsky.

I've always found a lot of humour in Tolstoy.

[larryhammer]

A translator seeped in George Elliot and Wharton should be able to find an English equivalent prose. Or so I'd think.

---L.