Poor Constance Garnett. Such noble ambition, such a pioneer translator of the Russian giants, such a heroic hard worker. And yet so cruelly maligned.
Alas, her enduring image is a daffy old lady. David Remnick writes in The New Yorker that a young drama student called Meryl Streep once played her in a satire, The Idiots Karamazov, at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Streep portrayed her as a ''muddled loon'' constantly mangling the translator's craft.
Vladimir Nabokov reviled her translation of Anna Karenina as ''a complete disaster'' and her version of Gogol as ''dry shit''. Joseph Brodsky said that the reason English-speaking readers couldn't tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky was that they weren't reading the prose of either one: ''They're reading Constance Garnett.''
The latest barb from the anti-Garnett brigade came from Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine at last month's Adelaide Writers Week. ''I came across her when I read her translation of Crime and Punishment and I thought it was wonderful,'' he said. ''Little did we know that she was also horrible.'' Until the 1960s, Garnett's was the only English version of the Dostoevsky masterpiece. ''My aunt told me, 'Try the French translation, it's funnier'. Constance Garnett was never funny.''
Who was this woman who aroused such passion and mockery? She was English, born Constance Black in 1861. She must have been exceptionally bright, and she must have had a hard childhood: her father was paralysed, and when she was 14, her mother died from a heart attack caused by the exertion of moving her husband from his chair.
She read classics at Cambridge, married a publisher's reader, Edward Garnett, and had one child (the novelist David Garnett). She learned Russian from the exile Felix Volkhovsky during her difficult pregnancy and began to translate stories soon after. On her first trip to Russia in 1894, she met Tolstoy.
Over four decades, her output was prodigious: translations of 71 volumes of Russian literary works, including all Dostoevsky's novels; hundreds of Chekhov stories; most of Tolstoy; all of Turgenev. She was frail and half-blind by the late 1920s, but didn't retire until 1937, and died in 1946.
Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence praised her warmly, and the latter described her at work, ''sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvellous 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.''
It would be hard to overestimate her influence on Western literature: for decades, she was the one authority on how the Russian masters were supposed to sound and feel, and her translations opened up their treasures to writers such as Ernest Hemingway.
But then the Russian exiles began to snipe at her. She worked too fast, they said; she got things wrong, and she made things sound too smooth and bland when the original could be choppy or convulsive. Gradually she ceased to be the translator everyone turned to and others took her place.
Translation is an art that doesn't stand still and we need different versions for different times, so we should be thankful that we have sources other than Garnett. And maybe Nabokov and Brodsky were right. But I don't want poor Constance mocked. She was so inspired and she did so much off her own bat, at a time when most women weren't expected to learn another language, let alone translate scores of great literary works. That should count for something.
