Guest post: Michael Pursglove on the ‘forgotten translators’

Rochelle Townsend with her children, c. 1904

My interest in early translations from Russian, and especially in their translators, began when I was setting to work on my translation of Turgenev’s Virgin Soil in 2014. It became clear that this would be the first new translation of the novel for over a hundred years, since Rochelle Townsend’s translation for Everyman Books in 1911. Townsend’s translation went through fourteen printings between 1911 and 1976, and the following year she published a translation, the fourth into English, of Anna Karenina. This was reprinted fifteen times between 1912 and 1968/9. In 1914 Rochelle Townsend made the first English translation of Uncle Vanya for a production by the Stage Society. This translation still awaits publication. Her work between 1911 and 1914 would mark her out as an important translator, and her career continued until the mid-1920s, as I outlined in my article ‘The Mysterious Mrs Townsend’ (East-West Review vol. 16, no. 3, issue 46, 2018). But, despite her obvious importance, she shared the fate of many translators in being almost invisible. I was able to make her slightly less invisible, but gaps remain in her biography, notably the first twenty years of her life, from her birth in Kiev in 1880, to her marriage to Charles Townsend in London in 1900.

For a start, let us take her name. Was it really Rochelle, or was this an anglicized form of Rachel/Рахиль? Was she perhaps Jewish and got caught up in the Kiev pogrom of 1881? Was the name under which she was married, Slavyanskaia (‘Slav woman’), given her to disguise her Jewish origins? In my article I suggested another possibility for the origin of her surname, but let me now mention some of the other mysteries surrounding her.

• Who were her parents?
• How did she learn English to such a high level?
• How did she get to England, and when?
• How, when and where did she meet Charles Townsend?
• After her career as a translator and prospective Parliamentary candidate, she claimed to have worked as a ‘journalist’. What was the nature of her journalistic work? Can any journalistic pieces be ascribed to her?

I had hoped that, after the publication of my article, documents would come to light which might enable me to answer some of these questions. This has not happened, although some new scraps of information have turned up. For instance, the Slough Eton and Windsor Observer covered events before, during and after the general election of May 1929. We see, for example, the somewhat unlikely picture of Mrs Townsend distributing trophies at tennis tournaments in two successive weeks in 1928, and the less unlikely picture of her receiving a ‘good luck’ telegram from the leader of the Labour Party, shortly to be Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald on 17 May 1929. The same issue of the newspaper added the following snippet of biographical information:

By a curious coincidence both the Conservative and Labour candidates are versed in the Russian language. Sir Alfred Knox, by years of residence in the country, has, of course, an excellent knowledge of the language and Mrs Townsend is an authority on Russian literature and has translated Russian works into English.

Another piece of information came to me via the excellent, as yet unpublished, dissertation of Maya Birdwood-Hedger, which compares different English translations of Anna Karenina. She points out that, among the very few errors in Mrs Townsend’s translation is her rendition of the innocuous-looking phrase in Part 5, Chapter 26, describing a minor character, Vasilii Lukich, as славянин–гувернер (‘slavyanin-guvernyor’, Slav tutor). Tolstoi merely wished to emphasise that he was not a foreigner – a Frenchman, Englishman or German – as was so often the case in Russian aristocratic households. Mrs Townsend, however, assumes that ‘Slavyanin’ is the man’s surname. On the face of it, this is simply a minor error. However, given that Mrs Townsend’s birth name, or assumed name, was Slavyanskaia, it becomes something closer to a Freudian error.

I may have been able to rescue, at least partially, Rochelle Townsend’s name from oblivion. I began to plan to do the same for other English, American, French and German translators from about the same era, and a letter from a long-standing Russian friend enabled me to begin the process. The letter concerned an early, and, to say the least, highly abridged translation of Goncharov’s third novel, The Precipice. The American edition of this translation ascribed it to ‘M. Bryant’. No further details were given, and it soon emerged that ‘M. Bryant’ had never published any other translations.

I tentatively identified the translator as the prolific and successful novelist Marguerite Bryant, but in the process discovered that the translation had been made not from the Russian but from a German version, Der Absturz, by Wilhelm Goldschmidt. Wilhelm who? Here was another early translator to investigate, and it emerged that Goldschmidt had lived and worked in Russia, and knew the language, unlike ‘M. Bryant’ who may well not have done. There was more. There were two other early translations of The Precipice, both French, both with eccentric titles (Marc le Nihiliste and La Faute de la Grand’mère) and both drastically abridged. The translators, respectively Eugène Gothi and Mikhail Osipovich Ashkinazi, did much to popularize Russian culture in France. The latter, under his pseudonym Michel Delines, is reasonably well documented, but details of Gothi’s life are extremely sketchy. In an article for East-West Review I was able to add a little more to his story, but the date of his death still eludes me.

There is  one obvious area that I have so far only very briefly touched upon – Russia itself. In 2012 I published an article on Anna Petrovna Kern who, in addition to being the recipient of Pushkin’s most famous love lyric, and a noted memoirist, translated extensively from French literature. She may well have translated a novel by George Sand (probably André) but the manuscript has either been lost or remains undiscovered. In the course of my research I found that there were at least 200 translators into Russian (mainly from French, German and English) active in Russia in the nineteenth century . Many of them were women and most have been almost totally forgotten. So who was the anonymous first translator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? If I were able to establish that I would be following in the footsteps of Dr James Muckle, whose James Arthur Heard (1798-1875) and the Education of the Poor in Russia (2013) charts the career of a remarkable Englishman. James Heard arrived in Russia in 1817 and spent most of the rest of his life in Russia, becoming known as Яков Иванович Гёрд. He learned Russian so well that he was able to publish, in 1846, a translation of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which was reprinted as late as 1897. He also wrote a Russia-themed novel The Life and Times of Nathalia Borissovna, Princess Dolgorookov.

My current research focuses on another Anglo-Russian translation project. Beatrix Tollemache (1840-1926) learned Russian at the age of seventy, and within three years had published translations of a series of literary texts, both poetry and prose, under the title Russian Sketches, chiefly of peasant life.

A brief introduction is provided by ‘N. Jarintzoff’. This turned out to be Mme Nadine Jarintzoff, known in Russia as Надежда Алексеевна Жаринцова. She is best known as the translator of the works of Jerome K Jerome, especially of Three Men in a Boat. Her life is reasonably well documented, although her maiden name is unrecorded, as are the place and date of her death, and at least one internet source back-transliterates her name as Яринцева. The nature of her collaboration with Beatrix Tollemache will be the subject of another article, hopefully in East-West Review.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.