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Revision as of 19:46, 3 September 2005 by Pharos (talk | contribs) (Category:Russian-English translators)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Constance Garnett (née Black) (December 19, 1861 - December 17, 1946) was an English translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics first introduced them on a wide basis to the English public. Garnett is the first English translator of Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
Garnett studied Latin and Greek, worked shortly as a school teacher. In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow during which she met Leo Tolstoy, she started translating Russian literature, which became her life passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov.
Her husband, Edward Garnett, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. Her son, David Garnett, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels. His most successful was Lady Into Fox.
Constance Garnett's translations of Russian classics were highly acclaimed in her time and are still being reprinted today, despite occasional complaints for being outdated. While she kept close to the syntax and vocabulary of the original, she occasionally excised certain portions liberally, as in her translations of Dostoevsky. It is sometimes claimed that she "retold Russian literature in Victorian English"; this is not strictly true, as the English she used is Edwardian rather than Victorian.