‘Is the mistress asleep or not?’ suddenly asked a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka.
That sentence is from Tolstoy’s story Polikúshka. I am in no position to say how the translation by Aylmer and Louise Maude (who translated almost all of Tolstoy's works) compares with the original but the fact that their work was approved by Tolstoy himself should leave no doubts on that score. Certainly, the book reads very well and naturally in English but I am unhappy about that sentence; the ‘suddenly’ sticks out a bit.
Other possibilities would be:
- A deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka suddenly asked ‘Is the mistress asleep or not?’
- ‘Is the mistress asleep or not?’a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka suddenly asked.
- ‘Is the mistress asleep or not?’a deep peasant-voice suddenly asked close to Aksyútka.
As I have said, I have not seen the original so I do not how this word order compares with it (I would have enough Russian to be able to work that out if I had the original), and I do not doubt that Tolstoy himself produced an elegantly-structured sentence. However, this is the beginning of a chapter (XIII) and I imagine that the direct speech is intentionally placed at the start of the sentence to provide impact. That rules out option 1. Option 2 keeps the noun phrase ‘a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka’ intact but at the cost of dangling the adverb + verb at the end of a long subject. Option 3 avoids this but at the cost of attaching the adverbial ‘close to Aksyútka’ to the verb ‘asked’ instead of to the noun ‘peasant-voice’. It might be said that the difference in effect is minimal but I am assuming that the intention was to keep the original sentence structure. That, I imagine, is why the translators opted as they did, and the inversion following direct speech would have worked fine were it not for that ‘suddenly’:
4. ‘Is the mistress asleep or not?’ asked a deep peasant-voice close to Aksyútka.
Speaking for myself I prefer option 3, but I raise the question to show that translation can raise problems that are difficult, even impossible, for even the best translators to solve perfectly – problems not just of finding the right words but of finding the best order to put them in.
