Constance Garnett

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Constance Clara Garnett (née Black) (19 December 1861, Brighton, England – 17 December 1946, The Cearne, Crockham Hill, Kent) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Garnett was one of the first English translators of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov and introduced them on a wide basis to the English-speaking public.

Life

Garnett was the sixth of the eight children of the solicitor David Black (1817–1892), afterwards town clerk and coroner, and his wife, Clara Maria Patten (1825–1875), daughter of George Patten.[1] Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black.[2] Her father became paralysed in 1873, and two years later her mother died, from a heart attack after lifting him from his chair to his bed.[3]

She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School. Afterwards she studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge on a government scholarship. In 1883 she moved to London, where she worked initially as a governess, and then as the librarian at the People's Palace Library. Through her sister, the labor organizer and novelist Clementina Black, she met Dr. Richard Garnett, then the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum, and his son Edward Garnett whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889. Edward, after working as a publisher's reader for T. Fisher Unwin, William Heinemann, and Duckworth, went on to become a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. In the summer of 1891, then pregnant with her only child, she was introduced by Edward to the Russian exile Felix Volkhovsky, who began teaching her Russian. He also introduced her to his fellow exile and colleague Sergius Stepniak and his wife Fanny. Soon after, Garnett began working with Stepniak, translating Russian works for publication; her first published translations were "A Common Story" by Ivan Goncharov, and The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy. The latter was published while she was making her first trip to Russia in early 1894. After visits to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, she traveled to Yasnaya Polyana where she met Leo Tolstoy; although the latter expressed interest in having her translate more of his religious works, she had already begun working on the novels of Turgenev and continued with that work on her return home. Initially she worked with Stepniak on her translations; after his untimely death in 1895, Stepniak's wife Fanny worked with her.[4]

Over the next four decades, Garnett would produce English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Alexander Herzen and Chekhov.

Her son and only child, David Garnett, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels.

By the late 1920s, Garnett was frail, white-haired, and half-blind. She retired from translating after the publication in 1934 of Three Plays by Turgenev. After her husband's death in 1937, she became quite reclusive. She developed a heart condition, with attendant breathlessness, and in her last years had to walk with crutches.

Translations

Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literary works, and her translations received high acclaim, from authors such as Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain).

However, Garnett also has had critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov's criticism of Garnett, however, may arguably be viewed in light of his publicly stated ideal that the translator be male. [5] [6]Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors:[3]

"The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett."

In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for "readability", particularly in her translations of Dostoevsky.[7] In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion.[3][8]

For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation.[9] This is the basis for the influential A Karamazov Companion by Victor Terras.[10] Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired with Notes From Underground.[11]

In 1994 Donald Rayfield compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov's stories and concluded:

"While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive.... Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable."[12]

Her translations of Turgenev were highly regarded by Rachel May, in her study on translating Russian classics.

Later translators such as Rosemary Edmonds and David Magarshack continued to use Garnett's translations as models for their own work.[8][13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Morales, Patricia. "Patten, George". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21570.  (subscription or UK public library membership required)
  2. ↑ AIM25 entry on Arthur Black
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 David Remnick (7 November 2005). "The Translation Wars". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2008-05-05. 
  4. ↑ Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life by Richard Garnett
  5. ↑ Ellen Pifer, "Her monster, his nymphet: Nabokov and Mary Shelley" in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. by Julian W. Connolly, (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
  6. ↑ David S. Rutledge, Nabokov's Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2011), fn. 7, p. 187
  7. ↑ See Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, pp 32-33
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Orlando Figes (22 November 2007). "Tolstoy's Real Hero". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2008-05-05. 
  9. ↑ Ralph E. Matlaw, ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1976, rev. 1981. See his "Afterword: On Translating The Brothers Karamazov, pp 736-744.
  10. ↑ Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981, 2002.
  11. ↑ Matlaw, Ralph E. (1960). Notes From Underground and The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: E. P. Dutton. (Now published by Penguin.)
  12. ↑ Donald Rayfield, "The Chekhov Omnibus", p. xxi
  13. ↑ Andrei Navrozov (11 November 1990). "Dostoyevsky, With All the Music". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-06. 

Sources

  • Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Patrick Waddington, ‘Garnett , Constance Clara (1861–1946)’, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 , accessed 31 Dec 2006.
  • Carolyn Heilbrun, The Garnett Family (1961).
  • Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (1991).

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