Constance Garnett

[Boris Dagaev]

Michele A. Berdy>>
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.
<<


But isn't it symptomatic of translation criticism as a whole? Dismissals and
denials are the norm.

On the other side, to quote:

"Their first effort, a version of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
(1990), was pitched against previous versions by translators like Constance
Garnett who, as Pevear put it, "revised, 'corrected', or smoothed over his
idiosyncratic prose" [… ]To restore the stylistic peculiarities that Garnett
has removed in the interest of fluency, Pevear and Volokhonsky adhered more
closely to Dostoevsky's Russian, a discursive strategy that has been
confirmed by various readers, native speaker of Russian as well as academic
specialists and translators of Russian literature. […] In this sort of
heterogeneous language, the results partly of adhering to the Russian text
and partly of experimenting with different registers and dialects of
English, that releases the foreignizing effects of Pevear and Volokhonsky's
translation against the fluent strategy of a translators like Garnett who
restricted herself mainly to the current standard dialect. Choices like
"fobbed him off" and "wastrel", "handouts" and cash", do not appears in her
version, nor does the syntactical inversion. She clearly aimed to facilitate
the reader's movement through the passage, going so far as to divide into
two the long sentence containing the inversion and to omit entirely the last
clause […] Nonetheless, Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation has displaced
Garnett's as the authoritative English version of Dostoevsky's text,
establishing a new kind of readability that makes the novel accessible to
both elite and popular readers. Sales bear out this development to some
extent: "The Brothers Karamazov sells 14,000 copies per year in Pevearn and
Volokhonsky's translation, a figure that is not doubt maintained by its
adoption as a textbook in academic institution, but that also indicates its
broad appeal to diverse audiences." (L. Venuti, The Translator's
Invisibility, 2nd ed., pp.122-123)

Seems like quite a few people and circumstances ganged up on her…


On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Michele A. Berdy <maberdy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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