Constance Garnett

Thank you Constance Garnett!

I say thank you because although it would have been inevitable for Russian literature to be translated to English, Constance Garnett did this for us. She was among the first to translate Russian to English. She translated a number of books that would be (if they weren't already) classics 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" (The New Yorker).

Wikipedia says that she translated "about 70 Russian literary works" (Wikipedia) which "introduced [nineteenth-century Russian literature] on a wide basis to the English and American public" (Wikipedia).

There have been other translators involved in Russian Literature but without doing research I have never heard of any of them. I had heard of Constance Garnett. On many of the Barnes & Noble classics involving Russian authors, she is the translator for that particular classic.

I know that I will be enjoying her translations for a very long time as I periodically am able to get to all of the Russian classics that I haven't had a chance to read. Her one translation that I have read though was Anna Karenina and I am appreciative that she devoted her time to it so that someone like me could read it.

The following link is a list of all works that she translated: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/biblo.htm

Works Cited:
Remnick, David "The Translation Wars" The New Yorker. 7 Nov. 2005. 20 May 2008

Wikipedia "Constance Garnett" Wikipedia. 20 May 2008