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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/18/war-and-peace-tolstoy-translate-into-bogan-australian-ander-louis>
"“Bloody hell, Prince Vasíli, Genoa and Luca are pretty much just Napoleon’s
holiday homes now,” reads the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s seminal epic,
War
and Peace.
It goes on to depict a 19th-century St Petersburg populated by “posh wankers”,
“complete drongos”, “gorgeous sheilas” and “massive pissheads”. They “talk
shit”, give “zero fucks” and drink “cuppas”, and before long, soldiers start
“fanging about”.
Astute readers may twig that this is not Tolstoy’s original Russian prose,
published in 1869, or any of the widely available English translations now in
the public domain.
This is the “bogan Australian” edition by Ander Louis, the pen name of a
39-year-old IT analyst and father of two based in Victoria.
“In 2019 I had no kids and no job, so a lot of time to pursue silly things,”
Louis explains over Zoom from his family home in Melbourne’s outer north.
Louis had first read
War and Peace just a few years earlier. He had always
loved literature, self-publishing several novels and teaching creative writing
to school groups – where he would jokingly tell kids that every aspiring writer
needed to read Tolstoy’s 150-year-old classic.
“But none of them do, myself included,” he laughs.
The 1,200-page tome had always seemed “unapproachable”. Then, in 2017, he
joined a Reddit group that pledged to crack it in a year, communally reading
one of its 361 chapters each day. What started as a challenge became a
revelation, and soon Louis set out to translate his new favourite book into a
more familiar lexicon, line by line."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
