The Art of Translation

Translators of foreign fiction are usually thought of, even in critical circles, as craftsmen. A good translator's work is as fine and precise as a stone wall or a basket. Beautiful, perhaps, but essentially defined by its function. A bad translator's work sprouts leaks and crumbles into ruin. Art is a term we use only for the underlying text. Dostoevsky is a great artist. Constance Garnett just serves her master.

I'm reading "Fathers and Sons" (in my view, the best of the nineteenth century Russian novels) in Mrs. Garnett's translation and, while I find some of her work rather crude, it's got me to thinking about the role this woman, whose name is probably not even known to a good number of Russian literature fans, played in shaping and creating Russian literature as it is known in English. Russian is one of the great modern European national literatures, alongside English, German and French. And yet it's quite possible that had Garnett not devoted her life to translating dozens of Russian works into English (most of them for the very first time, and including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin), Russian might never have attained that glorified status in the English-speaking world. At the very least it would have done so rather later.

What does this make Constance Garnett? Is she not, in her own way, a great and visionary artist, even in her failures? Do we not, as lovers of Anna Karenina and Raskolnikov and Nina Zarechnaya and Eugene Onegin, owe as much to Constance Garnett as we do to the great Russians themselves?

Of course, Garnett is relatively famous, and her vast influence is lost neither on her detractors nor her admirers. Two differing views of Garnett that both speak to her unique and groundbreaking impact on literature.

From Sontag's essay on translation, "The World as India":

Question: Who is the greatest Russian writer of the nineteenth century?
Answer: Constance Garnett.

And Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in a very interesting New Yorker article on Garnett and translation:

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.

Naturally, Garnett's fiercest detractors have often been Russians, especially those like Brodsky who were living in America where they could not avoid her translations. [A situation that has been largely remedied in recent decades by many "fresh" translations of nearly all of these writers.] So, let me leave my little ode to Mrs. Garnett with this typically hilarious and nasty jibe from Nabokov, regarding Gogol:

“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."