: ‘Authors are great, translators are not’: Shanta Gokhale on being a translator #IndiaNEWS Although the given title for my talk is “The challenges and rewards of translation�, I have re-titled

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‘Authors are great, translators are not’: Shanta Gokhale on being a translator #IndiaNEWS
Although the given title for my talk is “The challenges and rewards of translation�, I have re-titled it “The goddess in my puja room�, hoping to make it less yawn-worthy and more intriguing, perhaps eliciting questions like who is this goddess, and where is this puja room. The puja room is in my mind and the goddess is Constance Garnett, the translating machine who lived from 1861 to 1946 and translated, during fifty of those years, some 70 volumes of Russian prose into English, some of which I read growing up and perhaps you did too. Garnett started off not knowing Russian. She had to take a Russian émigré’s assistance to help her translate. But she soon wearied of the arrangement, studied Russian, went to Russia (where she met Leo Tolstoy in the flesh) and began to translate unaided. If today, the first line of Anna Karenina – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way� – is quoted in the English literary world as one of the finest first lines ever written, it wasn’t written by Leo Tolstoy. It was written by Constance Garnett. To put her in my puja room then, is the least I can do...Read more

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