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Constance Garnett: The Great Literary Translator — A Short Profile
She had a great fear of Lenin…
If, like me, you started to read, in English, the great Russian novelists and playwrights, in the 1950s and 1960s, you probably read the Constance Garnett translations. Garnett almost single-handedly made Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and the rest of them, available to the English speaking (and reading) world, and by so doing brought a different kind of literature. And as Carolyn G. Heilbrun has written:
“ All those for whom Russian Literature was the new found land of this century[early 20th]looked to Constance Garnett as the great revealer. Literally millions of readers were indebted to her for their first knowledge of a vast new realm of fiction and drama. Those born in England after 1880 often refer to her translations which ‘opened up new worlds of the imagination to readers of English’.”
Heilbrun goes on to write:
“ The tremendous impact of Constance Garnett on the appreciation of Russian literature in England and America did not really occur until after the Dostoyevsky translations had begun in 1912. After that, the cumulative effect of volume after volume of each author began to be felt.
“ From 1901, when her translation of Anna Karenina appeared, until about 1904, Constance Garnett translated some of Tolstoy’s work, which Heinemann published, in four volumes, in ‘popular’ as well as ordinary editions. Tolstoy had by then been translated almost completely; in 1899 Charles Scribner’s issued a twenty volume edition of his works, although, although Aylmer Maude [a contemporary of Constance Garnett, a fellow translator, and biographer of Tolstoy] did not, apparently, find these or other translations satisfactory…”
Aylmer Maude, with his wife Louise, had spent many years living in Russia, and rightly considered themselves experts not only on the country, but on the writers, many of whom they knew personally. As a good friend of the Garnetts, Maude, wisely, never referred to Constance’s work.
