Constance Garnett

[Michele A. Berdy]

Robert beat me to the punch. I also didn't like Remnick's dismissive 
description of Garnett and her work. As soon as I saw the word "genteel" in 
that article I knew what was coming. Garnett wasn't what I would call 
"genteel." The reason she was picking slugs off the leaves -- a quoted 
description in Remnick's piece -- was because her family depended on the 
garden for food. She was something of a free thinker politically and in her 
personal life. Today "tandem translation" is lauded as an innovative 
approach, but that's what Garnett did -- she gave part of her (pitiful) 
translation fee to native Russian speakers who helped her understand the 
texts and then checked/edited them. Yes, her style of translation is now 
old-fashioned. She smoothed things over, she missed some things. But if 
you've ever been stumped by a passage of Tolstoy and you check her 
translations, you find that she got it right more times than not. And she 
translated 70 volumes of prose that had never been translated before --  
without scholarly analyses, without dictionaries, without online forums, 
without a computer, without email, without any of the incredible resources 
modern translators have at their fingertips. I think people repeat the same 
old same old about her -- she was a lousy but prodigious translator --  
without really examining her translations and without any appreciation for 
the enormity of her achievement. (Yes, yes; I know I'm mother hennish about 
Garnett, but she deserves to be treated better than she is.)
Off soapbox now.

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