And in another new translation, this one by Marian Schwartz, she “clearly realized that he found offensive her hand, her gesture and the sound she was making with her lips.”

Surprisingly, all the translators ruled that the part of Anna’s anatomy that she believed repelled, repulsed, disgusted or offended Vronsky was her hand and not her arm, though the Russian word ruka can mean either. I happen to think Tolstoy is writing about the arm — one of those two full arms that were so beguilingly set off by the black gown Anna wore to the ball in Part 1, Chapter 22, when she and Vronsky fell in love. Now, in Part 7, Chapter 25, when Anna lifts her coffee cup, the full arm, the pinkie gesture and the noisy lips form a tragic triangle. On the subject of the lips, the two newer translations hew closer to the original Russian on the issue of the intentionality of the sound that Anna thinks annoys her lover: Tolstoy makes it clear that it is Anna making a sound with her lips, not her lips making an involuntary sound. Like the extended little finger, this is a habit that Vronsky may once have found charming — in fact, he may still, for, Anna’s jealousy and fears notwithstanding, he still loves her — but she thinks he no longer does.

What does she think he feels? If he is offended, he is making — or she thinks he is making — a sort of private social commentary on her provincial-aristocracy ways. If Vronsky is repulsed or disgusted, he is — or Anna thinks he is — having a visceral reaction to her very ways of being. If Anna thinks he is repelled, then perhaps she has a fleeting awareness of pushing Vronsky away. To decipher what Tolstoy wanted to say, the translator has to devise an interpretation of Tolstoy’s narrative voice in “Anna Karenina.”

◆

This is an exercise millions of native Russian readers of the novel perform several times in a lifetime. Teenage girls read the novel as melodramatic; adult readers of both genders begin to perceive irony — its amount seems to vary from reading to reading. The author’s sympathies, too, invariably appear to shift between characters with every reading; this, combined with ironic distance that is always contracting and expanding, makes the book endlessly rich — and endlessly difficult for the translator, who can never hope to keep pace with the author. How earnest, ironic, condescending, moralistic and simply funny a Tolstoy should the translator inhabit? Perhaps the only way to render Tolstoy’s variable voice is to continue producing ever-varying translations. The two new translations bring the number of published English-language versions to at least nine — or 10, if one considers the fact that Constance Garnett’s translation was significantly revised by Leonard J. Kent and the great Russian prose stylist Nina Berberova in 1965. Of these, Garnett’s and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s versions have enjoyed the tightest grip on the market, though it can be argued that neither came by its reputation on the basis of literary merit alone: Garnett for decades had a virtual monopoly on translating Russian classics, and Pevear and Volokhonsky sold hundreds of thousands of copies after their translation was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her television book club. Winfrey, however, had not read the book and chose this particular translation out of consideration of convenience only: It was the most recent and therefore the most widely available at that moment.