Garnett’s Granddaughters: Female Creative Minds in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Translation

Dr Cathy McAteer, University of Exeter Constance Garnett, the Matriarch of modern Russian literary translation into English, is credited with translating over seventy volumes of Russian literature and sustaining the so-called Russian Craze (May, 1994) at the turn of the twentieth century when Russian culture transfixed British readers. But by Garnett’s death in 1946, interest in Russian authors had waned, as if mirroring the downturn in Anglo-Russian political relations. During the Cold War, however, (inter)cultural curiosity reignited, creating transnational opportunities both for literature and for women translators. Penguin Books and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, Progress Publishers in Russia, and the New American Library (formerly Penguin USA) in the US independently commissioned new translations of the Russian Classics and Soviet literature, and British, emigrée Russian, and American women assumed key roles as literary translators. Some lesser-known female translators – like Moura Budberg, Vera Traill, Evelyn Manning, Margaret Wettlin – were commissioned for their cultural, linguistic, and literary capital. In return, literary translation provided employment, self-validation, and professional respectability. It also presented a platform for ideological activism including, on occasion, a smokescreen for political intrigue. Drawing on archival, sociological, and microhistorical Translation Studies research methodologies, my paper interrogates Garnett’s legacy in the twentieth century and examines the success with which her female successors claimed a gender-inclusive niche for themselves in the traditionally male field of the publishing industry. My research spotlights for the first time the professional careers (the practices, networks, tribulations, and achievements) and the socio-political contexts of these quietly influential women of the Cold War. I will also use my paper to evaluate the extent to which their roles as translators developed organically to include other persuasive forms of cultural gatekeeping, thus sustaining a rapport between Russia and the US, and Russia and the UK. References: Bourdieu, P., 1999. The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas. In: R. Shusterman, ed. Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 220-228. Casanova, P., 2004. The World Republic of Letters, trans. by Malcolm DeBevoise (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; repr. 2007) May, R., 1994. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Munday, J., 2013. “The Role of Archival and Manuscript Research in the Investigation of Translator Decision-Making”. Target, 25(1), 125-139. — 2014. “Using Primary Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns”. The Translator, 20(1), 64-80. Sela-Sheffy, R., 2008. “The Translators’ Personae: Marketing Translatorial Images as Pursuit of Capital”, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 53(3), 609-622. Simeoni, D., 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translators’ Habitus”, Target, 10(1), 1-39. Simon, S., 1996. Gender in Translation (Abingdon: Routledge).