Without [Constance] 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…”
BUT! Says Richard Pevear:
“Hemingway read Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him. But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean.”
– from “The Translation Wars,” a fantastic article on translating Russian lit written by David Remnick for the Nov. 7, 2005 NEW YORKER
Stumbled on this in search of Hemingway-Constance Garnett references. I read David Remnick’s essay on the Translation Wars, and I understand the irritation toward Constance Garnett. She wrote quickly, and used a clear, straight forward style. She smoothed out the stylistic differences between writers as different as Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. For that, maybe she deserves to be criticized. But her stuff reads smoothly, and her versions of the above literary geniuses are beautifully rendered, even if the reader is reading Garnett as much as the authors she translated. Maybe that’s the beauty of literature. A translated book is an interpreted book. Nobody asks a Bible-quoting proselytzer “hey, which translation are you giving me?” Let’s give the lady some props: she could write; she could translate; and, she had good taste. Rick Zollo