There are diaries that tell of trips, passions or long lives: even if it is limited to counting the creation of a book, Edit War and Peace It meets all of those vibrant postulates. Mario Muchnik’s (1931-2022) record of how he set out to prepare a definitive edition of Leo Tolstoy’s classic reflects both a risky adventure, a love for a unique novel, and the experienced fruit of a major editor.
Originally published in 2003, the testimony now preceded by an introduction by the poet Ida Vitale functions as an autobiography in miniature, since War and peace goes through Muchnik’s life in successive stages. The Argentine read that masterpiece for the first time as a teenager, in a Mexican edition that his mother passed him when she saw his son ripe for serious literature.
Muchnik’s cosmopolitan destiny would mark the following readings, in other languages and in the transition in which Muchnik went from being a physicist to a photographer and from there to becoming one of the key figures –following in the footsteps of his father, Jacobo Muchnik– of publishing. Hispanic American.
It was while occupying that role in Madrid that a fourth reading of War and peace –provoking “endless emotion”– convinced him to promote the most perfect Spanish version of the Russian text. Armed with an invaluable translator (the almost ninety-year-old Lydia Kúper), a synthetic cover artist (Eduardo Arroyo) and compulsive proofreaders, Muchnik fought a battle to be faithful to the original; then, yes, there was peace.
- Edit War and peace. Mario Muchnik. Storm Gray. 136 pages. $3,200.