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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). Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black. 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.

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 Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain).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 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:

"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.

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."

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.

See also

• Works by Constance Garnett at Project Gutenberg

References

1. AIM25 entry on Arthur Black
2. ^ David Remnick (7 November 2005). "The Translation Wars". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
3. See Rachel May, The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, pp 32-33
4. ^ Orlando Figes (22 November 2007). "Tolstoy's Real Hero". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2008-05-05.
5. Ralph E. Matlaw, ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1976, rev. 1981. See his "Afterword: On Translating The Brothers Karamazov, pp 736-744.
6. Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981, 2002.
7. Matlaw, Ralph E. (1960). Notes From Underground and The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: E. P. Dutton. (Now published by Penguin.)
8. Donald Rayfield, "The Chekhov Omnibus", p. xxi
9. 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).

External links

• A list of Garnett's translations , accessed 2 Jan 2008.
• Works by Constance Garnett at Project Gutenberg

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• Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge
• English atheists
• English translators
• People educated at Brighton and Hove High School
• Russian–English translators
• 1861 births
• 1946 deaths
• Translators from Russian
• Translators of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Translators of Leo Tolstoy