Constance Garnett
Encyclopedia
Constance Clara Garnett (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.
. 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.
She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School
. Afterwards she studied Latin
and Greek
at Newnham College, Cambridge
on a government scholarship
, where she also learned Russian
(partly from émigré Russian friends such as Felix Volkonsky), and worked briefly as a school teacher.
Her husband, Edward Garnett
, whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape
. Her son and only child, David Garnett
, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels.
In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow
, Saint Petersburg
and Yasnaya Polyana
where she met Leo Tolstoy
, she was inspired to start translating Russian literature
, which became her life's passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Ivan Goncharov
, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov
. The Russian anarchist
Sergei Stepniak
partly assisted her, also in revising some of her early works.
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.
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 Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain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 many critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov
and Joseph Brodsky
. Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors:
In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for "readability", particularly in her translations of Dostoevsky. In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion.
For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation. This is the basis for the influential A Karamazov Companion by Victor Terras. Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired with Notes From Underground
.
In 1994 Donald Rayfield
compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov
's stories and concluded:
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.
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
– 17 December 1946, The Cearne, Crockham Hill
Crockham Hill
Crockham Hill is a village in the Sevenoaks district of Kent, England. It is about south of Westerham, and Chartwell is nearby.The village street is on the line of a Roman road, the London to Lewes Way....
, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Garnett was one of the first English translators of Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
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). Her brother was the mathematician Arthur BlackArthur Black (mathematician)
Arthur Black was a mathematician, student of William Clifford at University College London, and brother to Clementina Black, the social reformer and author, and Constance Garnett, the translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics first introduced them on a wide basis to the...
. 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.
She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School
Brighton and Hove High School
Brighton & Hove High School is an independent day school for girls aged 3 – 18 in the city of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England.Founded in 1876, the school has expanded from being a very small school for less than twenty pupils to its present size of taking some 700 students...
. Afterwards she studied Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
at Newnham College, Cambridge
Newnham College, Cambridge
Newnham College is a women-only constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1871 by Henry Sidgwick, and was the second Cambridge college to admit women after Girton College...
on a government scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
, where she also learned Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
(partly from émigré Russian friends such as Felix Volkonsky), and worked briefly as a school teacher.
Her husband, Edward Garnett
Edward Garnett
Edward Garnett was an English writer, critic and a significant and personally generous literary editor, who was instrumental in getting D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published. His father Richard Garnett was a writer and librarian at the British Museum...
, whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
. Her son and only child, David Garnett
David Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.-Early life:...
, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels.
In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
and Yasnaya Polyana
Yasnaya Polyana
Yasnaya Polyana was the home of the writer Leo Tolstoy, where he was born, wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is buried. Tolstoy called Yasnaya Polyana his "inaccessible literary stronghold". It is located southwest of Tula, Russia and from Moscow.In 1921, the estate formally became his...
where she met Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, she was inspired to start translating Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
, which became her life's passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov .- Biography :Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk ; his father was a wealthy grain merchant and respected official who was elected mayor of Simbirsk several times...
, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
. The Russian anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
Sergei Stepniak
Sergei Kravchinski
Sergey Mikhaylovich Stepnyak-Kravchinsky , known in the 19th century London revolutionary circles as Stepniak or Sergius Stepniak, was the Russian who killed the chief of that country's secret police with a dagger in the streets of St. Petersburg in 1878.-Early life:Stepniak was the son of an...
partly assisted her, also in revising some of her early works.
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 ConradJoseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
and D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
. Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
).
However, Garnett also has had many critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
and Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...
. Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors:
"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. In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion.
For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation. This is the basis for the influential A Karamazov Companion by Victor Terras. Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired with Notes From Underground
Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground is an 1864 short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel...
.
In 1994 Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield
Donald Rayfield is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police...
compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
'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."
Her translations of Turgenev were highly regarded by Rachel May, in her study on translating Russian classics.
Later translators such as Rosemary Edmonds
Rosemary Edmonds
Rosemary Edmonds , born Rosemary Lilian Dickie, was a British translator of Russian literature whose editions of Leo Tolstoy have been in print for 50 years.-Biography:...
and David Magarshack
David Magarshack
David Magarshack was a British translator and biographer of Russian authors, best known for his translations of Dostoevsky....
continued to use Garnett's translations as models for their own work.
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 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33332, accessed 31 Dec 2006.
- Carolyn Heilbrun, The Garnett Family (1961).
- Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (1991).
External links
- A list of Garnett's translations http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/biblo.htm, accessed 2 Jan 2008.