Constance garnett biography
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Trailblazer Constance Garnett, Translator of &#;War and Peace&#;
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Constance Garnett with her son, David, in the mid s
Books are more important than ever during these strange times. They have the power to take us to another place at a time when we are all staying within our homes; they can open our eyes to different cultures and lives and they can offer comfort and distraction. Lovers of reading owe a debt to Brighton’s Constance Garnett ( &#; ), the first person to translate the work of iconic Russian novelists into English.
Born in in Ship Street, Constance was the younger sister of Clementina who was to become a Trade Union pioneer. A lover of reading and pupil of Brighton and Hove High School pupil, Constance, earned a scholarship to study Latin and Greek at Cambridge and followed this with a career as a librarian in London&#;s East End. In destiny inter
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The Woman Who Brought Dostoevsky and Chekhov to English Readers
My first publication was a translation, not something I wrote myself. It was an essay in Greek about the poet C.P. Cavafy for a literary anthology of that kind of thing. Before taking up Modern Greek I had spent thousands of hours of my youth translating Homer for my studies—probably too many hours, when I should have been doing something else. I am not very good at written translation, and have a tremendous respect for those who carry it off. Having a smaller vocabulary than English, Russian in particular requires the translator to wrestle constantly with nuance. (Dusha, for example, means “soul,” and also “heart” in a figurative sense. The word appears more than a hundred times in War and Peace.)
The one I hold dear to my own dusha, as a woman, and as a translator, is Constance Garnett. Born in Brighton in , Garnett translated 70 volumes from Russian, including
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When I was allowed to leave the children’s library and join the grown-ups library next door, it was like being let loose in a giant sweetshop, and, for reasons I still don’t ganska understand, inom felt drawn to a hexagonal bookshelf at the far end of the library. It was full of books with red spines (perhaps that’s what attracted me) and the writers had strange names – referens till den ryska författaren anton tjechov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev. inom became a voracious reader of these books, although I often wonder how much of them my young self understood. inom did meddelande that most of those books had been translated from Russian by someone called Constance Garnett, although I had little idea then what translating a novel involved. Only later, when inom myself began translating did I komma to appreciate the debt we owe to such translators as Constance Garnett, or perhaps particularly to her, since she revealed to non-Russian speakers writers now considered to be an essential part of the canon.
Constance Black was born in , the fift