Translation by Constance Garnett—She translated and published 13 volumes of Chekhov stories between 1916-1922. Her translations of his stories are the ones that I first began reading a couple of decades ago. Having read a few more recent translations of Chekhov’s short stories—I prefer hers. How she writes—how the lines are put together. There seems a certain spirit and poetry to them. Recently I read a bit about her. She was quite a person! She seems as talented and as bright as can be. Reading many of her translations over the years it seems somehow some of her spirit comes through. I am grateful for all her work / translations of Russian literature—Extraordinary that she translated so much in this time. Below the list here I have included some details of how she got to doing all this.
“Constance went on to translate Chekhov’s short stories and some of his plays. Of Chekhov she wrote: “…translating Chekhov has given me more pleasure than any other work I have done”. She then moved on to Dostoevsky, and her translations prompted something akin to a Dostoevsky cult.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov. 1912 The Idiot. 1913 The Possessed. 1913 Crime and Punishment. 1914 The House of the Dead. 1915 The Insulted and Injured. 1915 A Raw Youth 1916 The Gambler and Other Stories. 1917 The Eternal Husband and Other Stories. 1917 White Nights and Other Stories. 1918 An Honest Thief and Other Stories. 1919 The Friend of the Family and Other Stories. 1920 --- Constantine Feldmann — The Revolt of the "Potemkin". 1908 --- Gontcharoff Ivan — A Common Story. 1894 --- Nikolay Gogol — Dead Souls. 1922 Evening on a Farm Near Dikanka. 1926 The Government Inspector and Other Plays. 1926 Mirgorod. 1928 The Overcoat and Other Stories. 1923 --- Alexander Herzen — My Past and Thoughts, 6 vols. 1924-1927 --- Anton Chekhov — The Bishop and Other Stories. 1919 The Cherry Orchard and Other Plays. 1923 The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. 1920 The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories. 1922 The Darling and other Stories. 1916 The Duel and Other Stories. 1916 The Horse Stealers and Other Stories. 1921 The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories. 1917 The Letters of Anton Tchehov to Olga Knipper. 1926 Letters to His Family and Friends. 1920 Love and Other Stories. 1922 The Party and Other Stories. 1917 The Schoolmaster and Other Stories. 1921 The Schoolmistress and Other Stories. 1920 Three Sisters and Other Plays. 1923 The Wife and Other Stories. 1918 The Witch and Other Stories. 1918 --- Leo Tolstoy — Anna Karenin. 1901 Christianity and Patriotism. 1922 The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Other Stories. 1902 The Kingdom of God is Within You. 1894 War and Peace. 1904 --- Ivan Turgenev — A Desperate Character and Other Stories. 1899 The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories. 1899 Dream Tales and Prose Poems. 1897 Fathers and Children. 1895 A House of Gentlefolk. 1894 The Jew and Other Stories. 1900 Knock, Knock and Other Stories. 1922 A Lear of the Steppes and Other Stories. 1898 On the Eve. 1895 Rudin. 1894 Smoke. 1895 A Sportsman's Sketches. 1895 Three Plays. 1934 The Torrents of Spring. 1897 The Two Friends and Other Stories. 1922 Virgin Soil. 1896 Ostrovsky — The Storm. 1899 ---
“Constance Black was born in 1861, the fifth of eight children. She was exceptionally bright and, at the age of 17, got a place at Cambridge University to study classics. …
She particularly excelled at translation, and her tutor in Ancient Greek would always choose her to translate any particularly difficult passage. She graduated with the equivalent of a First Class degree, for in those days, women were not actually given a degree. Cambridge didn’t deign to do that until 1947! She went on to work as tutor to the children of a wealthy family, and then as a librarian in London. But where did her interest in Russian come from? Oddly enough, her paternal grandfather had commanded the first regular steam-packet between Lübeck and St Petersburg and was just about to embark on a career in the Russian navy when he died suddenly. Constance’s own father, however, although partly brought up in France and Germany, became an accountant in Brighton. No, an entirely chance encounter triggered Constance’s fascination with Russian. Her husband, Edward Garnett, arrived home one day announcing: “I have met a man after your own heart – a Russian exile – and I have asked him down for the weekend.” The man in question was Felix Volkhovsky, an exile from Siberia. He, Constance and Edward became great friends, and he later introduced them to a fellow political exile, Sergey Mikhaylovich Kravchinsky, Stepniak to his friends. This, wrote Constance, was “one of the most important events of my life”. She had already been reading Turgenev in French translation, but Volkhovsky and Stepniak encouraged her to begin learning Russian, and then try her hand at translating a novel by Ivan Goncharov. She wrote this: “The first sentence took hours to puzzle out, but I soon advanced to translating a page a day, writing it out as I deciphered it.” Then, since so few of Turgenev’s novels had been translated into English, Stepniak suggested she begin translating all of them, with him checking her translation as she went along. Constance wrote: “Oh! It is so difficult, I am amazed now at my impudence in undertaking it.” In 1896, Heinemann, the publisher of the Goncharov novel, commissioned her to produce a volume of Turgenev’s novels every three months (an extraordinary rate of production!), and, by 1922, she had produced seventeen volumes.
(These words are from Margaret Jull Costa — Royal Society of Literature) ..continued..
In 1893, Constance made her first visit to Russia, to St Petersburg and elsewhere. She met Tolstoy, whose treatise ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ she had already translated. And although she was disappointed that her speaking and listening skills did not match her reading skills, the visit confirmed her passion for Russian literature. On her return to England, she resumed her Turgenev translations. Her working method was to look up any words she didn’t know, then note down the English in between the lines, just as she had done as a student. She would then set to work translating the whole text, in longhand. When she had translated a few chapters, she would then go through her translation with Stepniak.
When Stepniak suffered a fatal accident, his widow Fanny moved to a cottage near the Garnetts, and, for a time, replaced him as Constance’s Russian consultant. Constance went on to translate Chekhov’s short stories and some of his plays. Of Chekhov she wrote: “…translating Chekhov has given me more pleasure than any other work I have done”. She then moved on to Dostoevsky, and her translations prompted something akin to a Dostoevsky cult. When Constance’s always poor eyesight began to fail, she recruited various other Russian-speaking friends to help her, with them reading out the Russian to her, so that she could then translate it into English. She retired from translating in 1928, but was briefly tempted back to translate three of Turgenev’s plays. Then her increasingly frail health forced her to stop altogether. She died in 1946 at the age of 85, having produced 71 translations.
Others have since translated many of the same Russian classics, and some critics have, inevitably, found fault with Constance’s translations, taking mean delight in discovering blunders or mistranslations. And yet for me, blunders or not, she was the voice of all those great Russians, and still is. I’ll let Constance have the final word:
“The translator has many hours of despondency in which the struggle to adjust the conflicting claims of two languages is seen clearly in all its hopelessness and the resulting compromise seems something too poor and imperfect to be worth the labour. What has given me the courage to persevere all these years in face of the always increasing sense of the difficulty – the impossibility – of successful achievement, has been the hope that contact with the work of the great Russians – even at second hand – must have its influence on the best of the younger generation – that it could not leave them unchanged. That has been my dream all these years.”
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Constance Clara Garnett.
19th December 1861 – 17th December 1946
English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to translate 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 translated 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.
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Unrelated to this — the recording I uploaded of me reading Bob Dylan’s liner notes to the album Highway 61 Revisited. I decided to re-record it yesterday. Something about the sound I didn’t like. I was testing out a new music recording device — but I prefer the old Tascam DR-07X.
Here’s the new one. Updated:
Highway 61 Revisited. Liner Notes by Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited. Released on this day in 1965. August 30, 1965.
This was recorded using the same music recorder that I recorded the second Bob Dylan Austin, Texas show. 2024.
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Unrelated to this — Some new paintings of mine. I will update my website with some of these, once they aren’t wet.
September 2025. Oil paint on card.
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Misty Morning — Oil paint on canvas paper. 2025.
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