Shocked, shocked, I tell you

[nineveh_uk]

I was going to write something brief and sarcastic to the effect that although it is some time* since I got half-way** through War and Peace, though my memory of it is imperfect I was pretty sure that it didn't contain surprise incestuous undertones, or indeed overtones. Fortunately for my dignity I looked up the character list first, and apparently the incestuous undertones are at least somewhat canon***. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the adaptation so far: for something set in Russia in 1805 I'm not getting much sense of a fundamentally different society to that of a generic Jane Austen adaptation, or indeed the present day UK, but I'll be watching the second episode.

I note that it so far lacks the extremely tight breeches of the big Russian film version, but it has one thing in common in that forty years from now, anyone who watches it will look at the women's hairstyles and think how much more they look like the period in which it was made than the period when it was set.

*About twenty years.

**I was disappointed it wasn't Anna Karenina II.

***Though I will need to make a second attempt to discover whether the novel had them as totally scurrilous rumour or otherwise. I will make sure I choose a more engaging translation.

ETA: I have just learned that the adaptation was by Andrew Davies, and thus all is explained.

Comments

[antisoppist]

I don't think it was a coincidence that there were two copies of War and Peace volume 1 at the farm (my mother's and my grandmother's) but none of volume 2. I did once get to the end of about chapter 2 in my teens but got put off by everyone having about five different names all used interchangeably.

I'm interested in the Briggs translation because he said female translators of the past couldn't write soldiers' slang and I don't know whether he's right or sexist. But to find out, I'd have to read all the translations and compare them, including the one that keeps all the French in French, and I haven't finished Les Miserables yet.

I recorded it and watched Endeavour (with interruptions).

[nineveh_uk]

My translation of Anna Karenina (trans. Rosemary Edmunds) had an introduction about the naming conventions (with examples), which was extremely helpful.

I read a couple of interviews with/articles about Briggs' translation when it came out*, and I must admit that my interpretation was "sexist". I'm sure there are issues with translating whatever Russian soldiers' idiom Tolstoy has in the book, but if it exists in the form that Briggs states I am more inclined to ascribe it to conventions at the time on translating literature rather than feminine ignorance of manly soldiers.

*Thinking vaguely that I might try reading W&P again.

[tree_and_leaf]

I wrote out everyone's name, patronymic, and nickname (helped by the introduction) and used it as a bookmark.

[caulkhead]

I've seen one edition which actually provided a bookmark like that. I thought it was a brilliant idea.

[antisoppist]

I was going to argue that female translators are just as capable of researching military slang as male ones are of researching descriptions of millinery (or whatever) but then I found someone on the internet saying that when Constance Garnett was translating War and Peace she just missed out any paragraphs she didn't understand.

[nineveh_uk]

Isn't there a really long passage somewhere in Tolstoy on jam making?

Skipping bits does sound unprofessional, though quite tempting if you were confident no-one was going to notice.

[caulkhead]

'Oh, for goodness sake, we've had fifty eight pages of battle already. Who's going to read this bit?"

[caulkhead]

I have read all of War and Peace, and enjoyed it very much, but I was on a very small island in the middle of winter with nothing very much else to do at the time. Don't think I would have made it through without the helpful chart at the front explaining who was who, though.

I have started Anna Karenina three times, and keep getting stuck at the harvesting scene.

[nineveh_uk]

Isolation is very helpful for these things.

I don't remember the harvesting scene in AK, but my teenage self was fond of Kitty and Levin and would climb over quite a lot for the next bit on them.

[aella_irene]

Coincidentally, I recently came across the Wikipedia pages for possibly incestuous Romanovs. They were 20th century, though.

[nineveh_uk]

Russian aristocratic life was clearly more decadent than I had supposed.

[aella_irene]

They danced together so often the Tsar had a strong word! He was "troubled by the intensity of her need for him"--this after they ran off to Paris together away from her husband.

I'm impressed at the amount of decadence people could commit in Russian Court Dress.

[nineveh_uk]

If you get to the point of the Tsar feeling obliged to have a word that's definitely a statement! Who were they, and is there a good book? Suddenly I need to read more about incestuous Romanovs.

[aella_irene]

Maria Pavlovna the Younger and her brother Dmitri. According to Wikipedia, there are her memoirs, and multiple biographies, but I couldn't say whether any of them are any good.

It looks like there'd be enough material for one of those historical trilogies, with the covers featuring women in mostly period dresses and improbable hair turned away from the viewer and a tagline like Duty...Passion...Revolution. I am absolutely not volunteering to write it.

[coughingbear]

forty years from now, anyone who watches it will look at the women's hairstyles and think how much more they look like the period in which it was made than the period when it was set.

Make-up too - I was very struck by this in the Walters/Petherbridge Sayers.

[antisoppist]

See icon for 1980s blusher.

[nineveh_uk]

Yes, that one's very noticeable. You'd think that they'd at least have made sure the shade of lipstick suited Harriet Walter even if it wasn't 1930s.

[lilliburlero]

I saw a gif of Gillian Anderson wearing a one-shoulder evening gown and Stephen Rea looking like a obsequious Suffolk Blackface crammed into mess kit and approximately shorn and had to go and have a little lie down.

[nineveh_uk]

obsequious Suffolk Blackface crammed into mess kit

You win the prize for most perfect description ever. Anderson, OTOH, I am having difficulty fully appreciating because my mind goes "Did they really wear one-shoulder evening gowns in St Petersburg then?"

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Doesn't start here till Jan 18. It's hard to believe that the 1960s USSR gave us tighter breeches than modern TV is capable of!

I read the novel so long ago I don't remember enough details to have an opinion on incestuous undertones--though I will say that I had no clue about Russian naming conventions at the time and was in a state of confusion regarding who was who for quite a while.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

There hasn't yet been a really formal court/ball scene, so perhaps tight breeches will make an appearance.

I was lucky in that the translation of Anna Karenina I read contained an introduction that explained the naming conventions with examples, so it at least gave me a start.

[white_hart]

I'm not watching it, but it does seem to be a general feature of historical drama that the women's hairstyles and makeup invariably look like the period in which the drama was made and not the period in which it is set.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It was Natasha's fringe that really made me roll my eyes!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I'm not watching it either, but this does seem to be a general - nay, almost universal - feature.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

The only exception that comes to mind is I, Claudius, and even there the men's hair does tend to look just a bit shiny and seventies-like. But the fact that I could watch it thirty years after it was made and not be immediately rolling my eyes at the women's hairstyles is a definite compliment to the costume/hair people. It really is a dilemma, though, especially as you go further back in time. Trying to recreate the real hairstyles on characters who are supposed to be raving beauties means you'll end up with a situation where you're trying to sell a modern audience on a court beauty who has plucked eyebrows and 100% of her possibly lice-containing hair hidden under a giant boxy hood. We just can't see it the way they did. On the other hand, there has to be some sort of middle ground between 100% genuine styles and something like Anne Of The Thousand Days where the styles probably looked dated forty-eight hours after its release.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I think that a balance can be struck. Maybe not always 100% accuracy, but at least not aiming for "current fashion!". I'm sure that the 1995 Pride and Prejudice hairstyles weren't absolutely accurate, but they were the idea of what was accurate, and they didn't give Elizabeth a pony tail. Whereas Natasha's hair in this looked like a 2015 high school pupil's. It under-estimates the audience; weknow people in the past looked different, let them at least a bit!

I thought that the recent Wolf Hall handled the fashion issue very well, not least in that pretty much everyone was wearing a hat/cap/headgear all of the time. I'm sure that they picked some of the ones that look more attractive to modern eyes, but the sheer sigh of relief at "Thank God, they're wearing hats, not all going round bare-headed" gave a big sense of verisimilitude. And though the 1980s Wimsey adaptations suffer make-up fail, I do think they do a good job with making Harriet's clothes. We see her wear the same things repeatedly through the whole series, and we can see she has less money than Wimsey - he wears his nice leather gloves at the beach, but she wears knitted ones.

[auntyros.livejournal.com]

I didn't watch it on the basis that the trailer looked like bog-standard Andrew Davies Austen, and I don't even much like that when the source material is Austen, let alone when it's supposed to be Tolstoy.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It was very Andrew Davies. I loved his P&P, but have had mixed feelings about most things he has done since.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I have read a good deal of it but it was a long time ago and I was laboring through the grammar and not really capable of picking up incestuous subtext if there was any. I'll have to either give up and get an English copy or break out my dictionary and give it another shot. What's weird is that given the time frame, it probably did resemble Jane Austen's society in a lot more ways than the current Russian upper-crust resembles their English counterparts, including the language! English and French were much more fashionable languages for the Russian aristos to teach their children than, well, Russian (hence you have Pushkin, a generation later, making fun of Tatiana for writing her love letter in French because her Russian is so poor).