With the prevalence of excellent literary translations that are available nowadays, we take for granted the fact that we are able to enjoy such literary masterpieces as the works of Homer, Proust, or García Márquez through the deft hand and careful eye of a translator. And there is one translator in particular who took great pains to bring the works of the Russian greats to an English-speaking audience.
Her name was Constance Garnett.
Garnett single-handedly translated 70 volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including hundreds of stories and plays by Anton Chekhov, all of Turgenev’s principal works, almost all of Tolstoy, and the entirety of Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre.
A close friend of Garnett’s was once quoted as saying he always thought of her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”
Garnett, born in the mid 1800’s, originally had no aspirations to enter the field of literature translation. She learned Russian when she was forced to rest through a complicated pregnancy, and after giving birth, she left her husband and infant son for three months while she went on a grand tour of Russia, even dining with Tolstoy himself. After returning home, she took up the care of the household and began her translating work.
But not everyone is a fan of Garnett’s. Vladimir Nobokov was famously critical of her work, as was Joseph Brodsky who once said, “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.”
But she had as many famous advocates as she had detractors: Ernest Hemingway was a famous admirer of Garnett’s, and he often said that he could not get through War and Peaceuntil he came about her translation. But whether or not she is as good or as bad as anyone says she is, can only be left up to an individual who is completely fluent in both Russian and English.
