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Revision as of 22:52, 22 October 2006 by Schöner (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Constance Clara 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 also the first English translator of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov.
Born in Brighton, Garnett studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she also learned Russian, and worked shortly as a school teacher. In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow and Petersburg during which she met Leo Tolstoy, she started translating Russian literature, which became her life's 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.
Constance Garnett's translations of Russian classics were highly acclaimed in her time and, despite some complaints about their being outdated, are still being reprinted today as they are in public domain.) 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 fairly modern during her times and is thus more reflective of the Edwardian era rather than the Victorian. However, due to Garnett’s not being natively Russian, she may have miscalculated when translating a few particular Russian words. For example, her translations have the word "Mass" in place of the proper name for the service of the Orthodox Church, which is Divine Liturgy or simply Liturgy. These problems have largely been solved by the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Volokhonsky is in fact a native Russian and is perhaps able to approach the text with a firmer grasp on nuance.
Still, Constance Garnett remains the standard text in English of many Russian classics of the nineteenth century, and many merits of her work have of late been perhaps underappreciated.