Selected translations by Constance Garnett

Selected translations by Constance Garnett

В конце 19 века викторианская девушка Констанс влюбилась в русского бомбиста-нигилиста Степняка, который, как уже тогда повелось, сбежал в Лондон, откуда наших не сдают и где он издавал журнал о России. Констанс вышла потом все-таки за другого- чопорного англичанина, но любовь к России у нее осталась на всю жизнь. Она съездила в гости к Толстому , стала учить русский, перевела у него на английский "Царство божие- внутри нас" , да так увлеклась, что не могла остановиться всю жизнь, перевела более 70 томов русской классики- Толстого, Чехова, Достоевского, Тургенева. Родила ребенка, в середине жизни ушла от мужа. Ведь У Констанс была одна любовь- Великая Русская Литература, которую западный мир впервый прочитал в переводах неутомимой Constance Garnett

Selected translations by Constance Garnett mobi zip download




01 Tales of Chekhov-The darling-Garnett.mobi
02 Tales of Chekhov The duell-Garnett.mobi
03 Tales of Chekhov The lady with the dog-Garnett.mobi
04 Tales of Chekhov The party-Garnett.mobi
05 Tales of Chekhov The Wife-Garnett.mobi
06 Tales of Chekhov The witch-Garnett.mobi
07 Tales of Chekhov The bishop-Garnett.mobi
08 Tales of Chekhov-The chorus-girl-Garnett.mobi
09 Tales of Chekhov The schoolmistress-Garnett.mobi
10 Tales of Chekhov The horse-stealers-Garnett.mobi
11 Tales of Chekhov-The schoolmaster-Garnett.mobi
12 Tales of Chekhov The cooks-wedding-Garnett.mobi
13 Tales of Chekhov Love-Garnett.mobi
1894 Goncharov A common story.mobi
1894 Tolstoy_The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You.mobi
1894 Turgenev_A_House_of_Gentlefolk.mobi
1894 Turgenev_Rudin.mobi
1895 Turgenev_A_Sportsmans_Sketches.mobi
1895 Turgenev_Fathers_and_Children.mobi
1895 Turgenev_On_the_Eve.mobi
1897 Turgenev_Dream_Tales_and_Prose_Poems.mobi
1897 Turgenev_The_Torrents_of_Spring._First_love._Mumu.mobi
1898 Turgenev_A_Lear_of_the_Steppes_and_Other_Stories_Garnett.mobi
1899 Ostrovsky_The_Storm.mobi
1899 Turgenev_A_Desperate_Character_and_Other_Stories.mobi
1899 Turgenev_The_Diary_of_a_Superfluous_Man_and_Other_Stories.mobi
1900 Turgenev_The_Jew_and_Other_Stories.mobi
1901 Tolstoy_Anna_Karenina.mobi
1912 Dostoevskiy_The_Brothers_Karamazov.mobi
1913 Dostoevskiy_The_Possessed.mobi
1914 Dostoevsky_Crime_and_Punishment_.mobi
1915 Dostoevskiy_The_Insulted_and_the_Injured.mobi
1916 Dostoevskiy_A_Raw_Youth.mobi
1917 Dostoevskiy_The_Double.mobi
1917 Dostoevsky_A_Gentle_Spirit.mobi
1917 Dostoevsky_The_Gambler_and_other_stories._Poor_People._The_Landlady.mobi
1918 Dostoevskiy_White_Nights_and_Other_Stories.mobi
1920 Chekhov Selected letters.mobi
1922 Turgenev_Knock_Knock_Knock_and_Other_Stories.292738.fb2.mobi
1923 Chehov_Selected_plays.mobi
1934 Turgenev_A_Month_in_the_Country-Garnett.mobi

Full list of translations
http://www.eldritchpress.org/ac/jr/biblo.htm


Constance Garnett mobi zip download

Chehov_Selected_plays.mobi
Chehov_Selected_short_stories_-1882-1887-.mobi
Chehov_Selected_short_stories_-1888-1892-.mobi
Chehov_Selected_short_stories_-1892-1895-.mobi
Chehov_Selected_short_stories_-1896-1904-.mobi
Chekhov Selected letters.mobi
Dostoevskiy_The_Brothers_Karamazov.mobi
Dostoevskiy_The_Possessed.mobi
Dostoevsky_Crime_and_Punishment.mobi
Tolstoy_Anna_Karenina.mobi
Tolstoy_The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You.mobi

download mobi zip

Chekhov Anton- Selected-early-short-stories-1886-Garnett.mobi
Chekhov Anton- Selected-early-short-stories-1887-Garnett.mobi
Chekhov Anton-Selected-early-short-stories-1882-1885-Garnett.mobi 
Chekhov Anton- Selected early plays.mobi


Constance Clara Garnett (née Black) (19 December 1861, Brighton, England – 17 December 1946, The Cearne, Crockham Hill, Kent) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Garnett was one of the first English translators of Leo Tolstoy,Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anton Chekhov and introduced them on a wide basis to the English-speaking public.

LIFE

Garnett was 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). Her brother was the mathematician Arthur Black.^[1] Her father became paralysed in 1873, and two years later her mother died, from a heart attack after lifting him from his chair to his bed.^[2]

She was initially educated at Brighton and Hove High School. Afterwards she studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge on a government scholarship, where she also learned Russian (partly from émigré Russian friends such as Felix Volkonsky), and worked briefly as a school teacher.

Her husband, Edward Garnett, whom she married in Brighton on 31 August 1889, was a distinguished reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape. Her son and only child,David Garnett, trained as a biologist and later wrote novels.

In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Yasnaya Polyana where she met Leo Tolstoy, she was inspired to start translating Russian literature, which became her life's passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev,Ostrovsky and Chekhov. The Russian anarchist Sergei Stepniak partly assisted her, also in revising some of her early works.

By the late 1920s, Garnett was frail, white-haired, 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 quite reclusive. She developed a heart condition, with attendant breathlessness, and in her last years had to walk with crutches.

TRANSLATIONS

Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literary works, and her translations received high acclaim, from authors such as Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain).

However, Garnett also has had many critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors:^[2]

"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."

In her translations, she worked quickly, and smoothed over certain small portions for "readability", particularly in her translations of Dostoevsky.^[3] In instances where she did not understand a word or phrase, she omitted that portion.^[2][4]

For his Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, Ralph Matlaw based his revised version on her translation.^[5] This is the basis for the influential A Karamazov Companion by Victor Terras.^[6] Matlaw published an earlier revision of Garnett's translation of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in a volume paired withNotes From Underground.^[7]

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 is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable."^[8]

Her translations of Turgenev were highly regarded by Rachel May, in her study on translating Russian classics.

Later translators such as Rosemary Edmonds and David Magarshack continued to use Garnett's translations as models for their own work.^[4][9]

***
British translator, born in Brighton, educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. A member of the Fabian Society, she worked as librarian at the People's Palace in the East End of London. In 1889 she married Edward Garnett, through whom she met Peter Kropotkin and other exiled Russian revolutionaries. From them she learned Russian in the months before the birth of her son, David Garnett, in 1892. The following year she made her first journey to Russia, bearing money for the relief of famine in Nizhniy Novgorod and secret communications from her Russian friends in London; she met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. Upon returning to Britain, she began her monumental endeavour of translating some seventy volumes of Russian prose, including all the novels of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev and most of the plays and stories of Chekhov. Her work did much to bring about the widespread influence of the Russian novel on English literature in the early decades of the twentieth century

***

Garnett translated 73 volumes of Russian literature, which included Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Herzen and many others, but translating Chekhov gave her more pleasure than any other work. Chance put her on the life-long path for which she was suited. In 1892, with her fiancé Edward Garnett, she went to Bedford Park to meet Volkhovsky, a revolutionary who had escaped from Russia and was editing an émigré journal called Free Russia. His pen name was Stepniak – a man of the steppe. Constance fell "not a little in love with him" and, providing her with a grammar and dictionary, he suggested she translate "those splendid Russians". It was a prodigious undertaking for a Victorian Englishwoman who had been a librarian in the East End of London. Her husband helped her with publication, ensuring that the editions be both inexpensive and available to young people. In time they lived separately; but as might a Russian heroine, she wrote to Edward: "Keep a warm heart to me – independence doesn't go very far."

In his life of her, her grandson Richard Garnett describes her, alone in her stone house in Kent, translating and tending her garden; she loved plants almost as much as she loved language. Her life was frugal, her dresses "unambitious", her one seeming luxury a Valor stove with two paraffin wicks, which her adored son, David Garnett, had bought for her. 

***

The Translation Wars

HOW THE RACE TO TRANSLATE TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY CONTINUES TO SPARK FEUDS, END FRIENDSHIPS, AND CREATE SMALL FORTUNES.

by David Remnick

 ( THE NEW YORKER)

...
As a literary achievement, Garnett’s may have been of the second order, but it was vast. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels; hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays; all of Turgenev’s principal works and nearly all of Tolstoy’s; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett’s, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact endurance, recalling her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”

Without Garnett, the nineteenth-century “Rooshians,” as Ezra Pound called them, would not have exerted such a rapid influence on the American literature of the early twentieth. In “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach’s shelves for the Russians and finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known. Before that, he writes, he was told that Katherine Mansfield was “a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer,” but now, after reading Chekhov, she seemed to him like “near-beer.” To read the Russians, he said, “was like having a great treasure given to you”:

In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house. 

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.”

Garnett (1862-1946) was one of eight children. Her father was paralyzed, and when Constance was just fourteen her mother died of a heart attack from the exertion of hoisting her husband from chair to bed. Constance won a scholarship to read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after graduation she married a publisher, Edward Garnett, the scion of a family of English literary aristocrats.

When the Garnetts were setting up housekeeping, Edward began to invite various Russian exiles as weekend guests. Constance was entranced by their stories of revolutionary fervor and literary ferment. In 1891, when she was confined with a difficult pregnancy, she began to learn Russian. Soon, she tried her hand at translating minor pieces, beginning with Goncharov’s “A Common Story” and Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” and then moving on to her favorite of the Russians, Turgenev. In 1894, she left behind her infant son and her husband and made a three-month trip to Russia, where she drove long distances through snowstorms by sleigh, visited experimental schools, and dined with Tolstoy at his estate.

When Garnett returned to England, she began an ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating. Mornings, she made porridge for her son David, and then, according to her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun, “she would go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, to kill the slugs; this was a moment of selfindulgence.” Garnett was a sickly woman, suffering from migraines, sciatica, and terrible eyesight, and yet her ailments did not deter her from working as a translator. She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own. (So, too, did the Maudes, her only rival in Tolstoy.) Garnett went nearly blind working on “War and Peace.” She hired a secretary, who read the Russian text to her aloud; Garnett would dictate back in English, sometimes grabbing away the original text and holding it a few inches from her ailing eyes.

Hemingway recalls telling a friend, a young poet named Evan Shipman, that he could never get through “War and Peace”—not “until I got the Constance Garnett translation.” Shipman replied, “They say it can be improved on. I’m sure it can, although I don’t know Russian.”