Should be at a party to celebrate the Announcement Of The Recession but cried off citing indigestion

Among the stacks of books I had not previously got around to reading, 'Anna Karenina'. Had always meant to, though all I knew of it hitherto is that the lady of the title does not buy a return ticket. Saw Il'ya Repin's portrait of Tolstoy at that RA exhib not long ago, which gave me fresh impetus - the fellow was standing in the out of doors, barefoot and in his nightshirt. How could I not?

I took advice on the translation. Limits to what can be done to convey style - only deadpan travels relatively unharmed. Best you can hope for is that the prose made their own is unobjectionable. I was ordered to seek out the rendering by Constance Garnett. A perfectly Victorian name, speaking of sublimated urges, which is what you want in a translator.

In fact her work was the only one in my language to be found. There's an Oxford Classic edition faced with that hoity toity sort in the Ivan Kramskoy painting, and several others but I bought an import on the strength of the lovely supple floppiness of the cover. Didn't look at the introduction - I usually read these last, like film reviews they make more sense afterwards. Only when several pages into the thing did I sense something missing among the words.

Went back to the forenote, and after emphatically saying they have not flipped with the text they admit to having altered some 'Britishisms'. What are Britishisms? Perhaps in Miss Garnett's unaltered draft someone is erroneously depicted lurking about the samovar with a jug of Jersey cream? The sleighs and carts misrepresented driving on the wrong side of the carriageway?

So far, no appreciable damage. The cleaner at the publishing house will have been finding the odd excised 'and' here and expurgated 'to' there for several weeks after the adaptation process, but I seem to mentally slip them back in anyway.

Even without trousers there are some satisfying lines. Just as much as the one about families, etc, I like the ones that just sit nicely, even if not doing a great deal beyond the necessary. At the opening of the chapter in which the youngest Tcherbatskaya starts pashing on Mlle Varenka:

It was a wet day; it had been raining all the morning, and the invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades.

I can read that repeatedly without it ever seeming banal to me.