McAteer, Cathy

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 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.

For translators like Moura Budberg, Elisaveta Fen, Rosemary Edmonds, Ann Dunnigan, Olga Carlisle, Vera Traill, Margaret Wettlin, and Mirra Ginsburg – commissioned for their cultural, linguistic, and literary capital – literary translation provided employment, self-validation, and professional respectability. Literary translation also presented, for some, a platform for activism and, for others, a smokescreen for political intrigue. Drawing on archival and microhistorical research, my paper interrogates Garnett’s legacy and the success with which Garnett’s lesser-known 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 social impact of these quietly powerful women and how their creative practices influenced modern translation publishing.

Dr Cathy McAteer is Postdoctoral Fellow on the “Dark Side of Translation” project (rustrans.exeter.ac.uk). She holds a PhD (2018) in Russian and Translation Studies from the University of Bristol, a Masters in Translation Studies (2011) and a first-class BA (Hons) in Russian (1996). Her main research interests lie in the field of classic Russian literature in English translation during the twentieth century, using archival material to shed light on the people and processes behind historical commissions, specifically Penguin’s Russian Classics. Her academic monograph, Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics, was published by Routledge as Open Access in 2021. Cathy is currently researching the private, archived papers of twentieth-century female translators of Russian literature as the basis for her next publication.

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