25-607: Constance Clara Garnett ( née Black ; 19 December 1861 – 17 December 1946) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature . She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov 's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky 's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev , Leo Tolstoy , Nikolai Gogol , Ivan Goncharov , Alexander Ostrovsky , and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today. Garnett
50-472: A hammerbeam roof . Crockham Hill Church of England Primary School was built below Holy Trinity Church in 1867 at a cost of £1,252. The school was enlarged and modernised after the First World War, and again in 1922 when a new classroom and cloakroom were added. In 1872, John Marius Wilson 's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales gave the follow description of the village: Crockham-Hill,
75-577: A man's surname at birth that has subsequently been replaced or changed. The diacritic mark (the acute accent ) over the e is considered significant to its spelling, and ultimately its meaning, but is sometimes omitted. According to Oxford University 's Dictionary of Modern English Usage , the terms are typically placed after the current surname (e.g., " Margaret Thatcher , née Roberts" or " Bill Clinton , né Blythe"). Since they are terms adopted into English (from French), they do not have to be italicized , but they often are. In Polish tradition ,
100-537: A 35-foot well, which was used by pilgrims on their way to Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket 's tomb in Canterbury and, in the 1950s, was recorded as a possible safe supply of drinking water in the event of atomic warfare. Holy Trinity Church , a Church of England parish church, was constructed in 1842, in the Gothic Revival style. It is a Grade II listed building, of stone construction with
125-503: A chapelry in Westerham parish, Kent: at the boundary with Surrey, 2 miles N of Eden-bridge r. station, and 2¼ S of Westerham. It was constituted in 1842. Post town, Edenbridge. Rated property, £1, 930. Pop., 542. Houses, 108. The property is subdivided. A hill which gives name to the chapelry commands an extensive panoramic view. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Canterbury. Value, £105.* Patron, Mrs. W. St. John Mildmay. The church
150-474: A heart attack after lifting him from his chair to his bed. She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School . Afterwards she studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge , on a government scholarship. In 1883 she moved to London, where she started work as a governess, and then as the librarian at the People's Palace Library. Through her sister, Clementina, she met Dr. Richard Garnett, then
175-532: A volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original" and that the same criticisms applied to her translation of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich . He concluded that: [H]er translations of the works of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov have to be done over. All of her translations seem insipid, pale, and—worst of all—trivial... [H]er translations would have been considerably better if they had been submitted at
200-633: Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy . The latter was published while she was making her first trip to Russia in early 1894. After visits to Moscow and Saint Petersburg , she travelled to Yasnaya Polyana where she met Tolstoy; although the latter expressed interest in having her translate more of his religious works, she had already begun working on the novels of Turgenev and continued with that on her return home. Initially she worked with Stepniak on her translations; after his untimely death in 1895, Stepniak's wife Fanny worked with her. From 1906, her favourite amanuensis
225-483: Is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable. Later translators such as Rosemary Edmonds and David Magarshack continued to use Garnett's translations as models for their own work. For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov , Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation. This is the basis for the influential A Karamazov Companion by Victor Terras. Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of
250-416: Is the feminine past participle of naître , which means "to be born". Né is the masculine form. The term née , having feminine grammatical gender , can be used to denote a woman's surname at birth that has been replaced or changed. In most English-speaking cultures, it is specifically applied to a woman's maiden name after her surname has changed due to marriage. The term né can be used to denote
275-454: The public domain ). However, Garnett also has had critics, notably Russian authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky . Nabokov said that Garnett's translations were "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." Commenting on a letter of Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett, in which Conrad had written that "[Constance's] translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself [i.e. Anna Karenina] I think but little, so that her merit shines with
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#1732793570780300-510: The Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired with Notes from Underground . Notes Sources Birth name#Maiden and married names A birth name is the name given to a person upon birth. The term may be applied to the surname , the given name , or the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a birth certificate or birth register may by that fact alone become
325-976: The Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum , and his son Edward Garnett , whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889. Edward, after working as a publisher's reader for T. Fisher Unwin, William Heinemann, and Duckworth, went on to become a reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape . In the summer of 1891, then pregnant with her only child, she was introduced by Edward to the Russian exile Feliks Volkhovsky , who began teaching her Russian. He also introduced her to his fellow exile and colleague Sergius Stepniak and his wife Fanny. Soon after, Garnett began working with Stepniak, translating Russian works for publication; her first published translations were A Common Story by Ivan Goncharov , and The Kingdom of God
350-606: The Royal Oak, and Holy Trinity church. Crockham Hill comes from the Old English 'crundel' meaning a 'chalk-pit, quarry' with 'ham' as a 'village, homestead' and 'hyll' for 'hill'; therefore, the 'quarry village on the hill'. The village street is on the line of a Roman road, the London to Lewes Way . Initially a cider house and inn , the buildings of the Royal Oak pub are thought to be at least 500 years old. The Inn had
375-537: The Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English . However, May's study also critiqued Garnett for her tendency of "stylistic homogenizing" that "eras[ed] those idiosyncrasies of narrative voice and dialogue that different authors possessed" and for making prudish word choices that "tamed [the Russian classics] further." May also analyzed how for decades, Garnett's translations were unquestioningly acclaimed by critics because "she suited
400-592: The age of 84. Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literary works, and her translations received acclaim from numerous critics and authors, including Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence . Ernest Hemingway admired her translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky and once told a friend that he was unable to read through Leo Tolstoy 's War and Peace "until I got the Constance Garnett translation." Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most are now in
425-795: The difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett. Ronald Hingley criticized Garnett's translations of colloquial speech in Chekhov's stories, stating "These are not very convincing samples of country speech ... or of a Russian village in the 1890s." David Foster Wallace criticized Garnett's translations as 'excruciatingly Victorianish'. In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for "readability", particularly in her translations of Dostoyevsky. Her translations of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov were well regarded by Rachel May in her study on translating Russian classics, The Translator in
450-468: The greater luster", Nabokov wrote "I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor". (Nabokov's criticism of Garnett, however, should be viewed in light of his publicly stated ideal that the translator must be male.) Brodsky criticised Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors: The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell
475-402: The needs of her time so well, that no one knew what questions to ask." Kornei Chukovsky respected Garnett for introducing millions of English readers to Russian literature, and praised her translations of Turgenev, stating that they "fully correspond to the originals in tonality," but condemned her other translations, writing that she had reduced Dostoevsky's style into "a safe blandscript: not
500-560: The person's legal name . The assumption in the Western world is often that the name from birth (or perhaps from baptism or brit milah ) will persist to adulthood in the normal course of affairs—either throughout life or until marriage. Some reasons for changes of a person's name include middle names , diminutive forms, changes relating to parental status (due to one's parents' divorce or adoption by different parents), and gender transition . The French and English-adopted née
525-401: The popular Lady into Fox (1922) . By the late 1920s, Garnett was frail and half-blind. She retired from translating after the publication in 1934 of Three Plays by Turgenev. After her husband's death in 1937, she became reclusive. She developed a heart condition, with attendant breathlessness, and in her last years had to walk with crutches. She died at The Cearne, Crockham Hill , Kent, at
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#1732793570780550-517: The term z domu (literally meaning "of the house", de domo in Latin ) may be used, with rare exceptions, meaning the same as née . Crockham Hill Crockham Hill is a village in the Sevenoaks district of Kent , England. It is about 3 miles (5 km) south of Westerham , and Chartwell is nearby. The village has a population of around 270 people. It contains a 19th-century pub,
575-408: The time to the intense scrutiny of critics... But there was no criticism" In 1994 Donald Rayfield compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov's stories and concluded: While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive... Her English
600-478: Was a young Russian woman, Natalie Duddington whom she had met in Russia and in whom she found "real intellectual companionship". Over the next four decades, Garnett produced English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy , Gogol , Goncharov , Dostoyevsky , Turgenev , Ostrovsky , Herzen and Chekhov . Her son and only child, David Garnett , trained as a biologist and later wrote novels, including
625-480: Was born in Brighton , England, the sixth of the eight children of the solicitor David Black (1817–1892), afterwards town clerk and coroner, and his wife, Clara Maria Patten (1825–1875), daughter of painter George Patten . Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black , and her sister was the labour organiser and novelist Clementina Black . Her father became paralysed in 1873, and two years later her mother died from
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