Product Code Database
Rosemary Lilian Edmonds, née Dickie (20 October 1905 – 26 July 1998), was a British translator of Russian literature whose versions of the novels of Leo Tolstoy have been in print for 50 years.
During World War II Rosemary Edmonds was translator to General de Gaulle at Free France Headquarters in London, and after Liberation, in Paris.Her biography in the Penguin Classics translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons After this Penguin Books commissioned a series of translations from her. Tolstoy was her speciality.Obituary: Rosemary Edmonds, by James Fergusson. Date: 14 August 1998.
Her translation of Anna Karenina, entitled Anna Karenin, appeared in 1954. In a two-volume edition, her translation of War and Peace was published in 1957. In the introduction she wrote that War and Peace "is a hymn to life. It is the Iliad and Odyssey of Russia. Its message is that the only fundamental obligation of man is to be in touch with life . . . Life is everything. Life is God . . . To love life is to love God." Tolstoy's "private tragedy", she continues, "was that having got to the gates of the Optinsky monastery, in his final flight, he could go no further, and died." She also published translations of Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev.
Later in life she released translations of texts by members of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1982 her translation of the Byzantine Rite was published by the Oxford University Press, "primarily for the use for the Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex". She had learned Old Church Slavonic to complete the project.
The Australian critic Robert Dessaix thought Edmonds' version of Anna Karenina, though not entirely satisfactory, reproduced Tolstoy's voice more closely than that of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The academic Henry Gifford wrote of her work as a translator that it "is readable and it moves lightly and freely; the dialogue in particular is much more convincing than that contrived by the Maudes", though he found her "sometimes lax about detail". (2025). 9780521169219, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521169219
|
|
