Constance Garnett

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Constance Garnett Anonymous Thu May 6 17:14:13 2021 No.18190308 [Reply] [Original]

Are Constance Garnett's translation worth reading? Particularly Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment?

I know that this The New Yorker article quotes some of her critics, but are they warranted?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars
>Among the most astringent and authoritative critics of Garnett were Russian exiles, especially Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov, the son of a liberal noble who was assassinated at a political conference, left Russia in 1919. He lived in Europe until 1940, when he came to the United States. In “Lectures on Russian Literature,” there is a facsimile of the opening pages of his teaching copy of the Garnett “Anna Karenina.” On the blank left-hand page, Nabokov has written a quotation from Conrad, who told Garnett’s husband, Edward, “Remember me affectionately to your wife, whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with greater lustre.” Angrily, Nabokov scrawls, “I shall never forgive Conrad this crack”—he ranks Tolstoy at the top of all Russian prose writers and “Anna” as his masterpiece—and pronounces Garnett’s translation “a complete disaster.” Brodsky agreed; he once said, “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”

>Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on. Life is short, “The Idiot” long. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up.” For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.” When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”

>A less imperious but no less discerning critic, Kornei Chukovsky (who was also a famous writer of children’s books), esteemed Garnett for her work on Turgenev and Chekhov but not for her Dostoyevsky. The famous style of “convulsions” and “nervous trembling,” he wrote, becomes under Garnett’s pen “a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.”

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