Garnett worked at the People’s Palace, a library designed to improve the education of working people in London’s East End. She was friends with George Bernard Shaw, who claimed he would have liked to marry her had he been richer. She lectured a little, taught, moved to London, and associated with the Fabians-a movement which she later joined, and later still left. She began learning Russian just before she turned 30 when she fell in with a gang of fiery exiles. She read classics and math, both of which provided rigorous training in the art of translation and the expression of precise meanings. When she went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a scholar at 17, she had never before left Sussex. She was the opposite of a Little Englander, determined to see things from an international point of view.įair-haired, short-sighted, and in poor health all her life, Garnett had a pinched childhood.
She was an indefatigable worker who moved through the literary and political circles of a troubled time and emerged as a heroine, always on the side of the poor and oppressed, fighting in a man’s world. Born in Brighton in 1861, Garnett translated 70 volumes from Russian, including all Dostoyevsky’s baggy monsters. The one I hold dear to my own dusha, as a woman, and as a translator, is Constance Garnett. The word appears more than a hundred times in War and Peace.) ( Dusha, for example, means “soul,” and also “heart” in a figurative sense. Having a smaller vocabulary than English, Russian in particular requires the translator to wrestle constantly with nuance. I am not very good at written translation, and have a tremendous respect for those who carry it off. 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. Cavafy for a literary anthology of that kind of thing. It was an essay in Greek about the poet C.P. My first publication was a translation, not something I wrote myself.
0 kommentar(er)
