Constance Garnett

[kristi.groberg at NDSU.EDU]

Fascinating topic and I'm glad to be enlightened about her.


> 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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