Natalie Duddington

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Natalie Duddington
Born14 November 1886
Haringey, England

Natalie Duddington (née Ertel; 14 November 1886 – 30 May 1972)

philosopher and a translator of Russian literature
into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie (with an h).

Biography

Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in

first-class degree in philosophy in 1909.[3] At UCL she was a student of the philosopher Dawes Hicks who wrote that she had helped to advance Russian philosophy through her translation of two substantial works of Russian philosophy (by Alexander Lossky and Semyon Frank).[5]

Through her interest in Theosophy, Natalie met John "Jack" Nightingale Duddington, who had been appointed Rector of Ayot St Lawrence in 1905. He divorced his wife in 1911 and began living with Ertel.[6][3] She married John; they had two children.[1]

Translating

While in England, Duddington began to assist Constance Garnett, whose eyesight was very poor, in making translations from Russian. Duddington would read her the Russian text, sentence by sentence, and write down the English translation to Constance’s dictation.[7] She elucidated difficult passages and provided background information; thus the final version was the result of close collaboration between the two of them. Natalie was one of very few people of whom Constance could say that their minds met, and they became life-long friends.[8]

Duddington greatly admired

Dostoyevsky's novels and successfully campaigned for their translation. Heinemann gave Garnett a contract at the end of 1910,[9] and by 1920 they had completed all twelve volumes, about two-and-a-half million words in all. In the end, Garnett translated around seventy Russian literary works, and Duddington was closely involved with about half of them. When Garnett's productivity eased off after 1920, Duddington undertook more than two dozen works by herself. Among the writers that she translated, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, and Nikolay Lossky were intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks from Russia in 1922 on what is known as the Philosophers' ships. Lossky was personally known to her: "Through 1920 and 1921, at the height of the famine which killed millions on the lower Volga and thousands in the cities, [the Lossky family] survived only with the help of food parcels sent by . . . Natalie Duddington."[10]

Her partner, Jack, initially helped check that her English was idiomatic; in fact some of her first translations were actually attributed to him. (For instance, in 1908 the Stage Society put on The Bread of Others by Turgenev, "translated by J. Nightingale Duddington" – who at this point knew no Russian.) Richard Freeborn, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London, wrote of Duddington's translation of Oblomov, for instance, that "in its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of Goncharov's Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance, it has about it a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original."[11]

Duddington was the first to translate several works by Russian authors into English, including Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family, and a volume of Anna Akhmatova's Forty-Seven Love Poems.[1] Her obituary in The Times wrote that she deserved "much of the credit for spreading an appreciation of Russian literature in England."[1]

Philosophy

Duddington had an interest in philosophy.[1] In 1916 she, along with philosophers Beatrice Edgell, and Susan Stebbing were some of the first women to be elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society.[12] In 1918 she read a paper on "Our Knowledge of Other Minds" to the Aristotelian Society.[13] It was critically reviewed in an issue of Mind, to which she wrote a considered response: "Do we know other minds mediately or im-mediately?"[14][15][16] Duddington considered some of her translations of Russian philosophers her "most worthwhile" work.[1]

English translations

Books edited and/or compiled

  • A First Russian Reader. 1943[41]
  • Intermediate Russian Reader. 1949[42]
  • Russian short stories: XIXth century (an "Oxford Russian Reader") 1953[43]
  • Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Selections. 1959[44]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h "Mrs. Natalie Duddington". The Times. 24 June 1972.
  2. ISBN 1856190331
    .
  3. ^ a b c Garnett p. 250
  4. ISBN 978-0-679-41729-3
    .
  5. ^ Wolff, Jonathan. "Philosophy at University College London since Bentham". UCL. Retrieved 16 August 2017.
  6. ^ National archives case J 77/1037/1434 at Kew, dated 20 March 1914
  7. ^ Garnett p. 251
  8. ^ Garnett p. 252
  9. ^ Garnett p. 259
  10. ^ Chamberlain, Lesley. Lenin's Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, New York: Atlantic Books, 2006, pp. 34–35
  11. ISBN 9780679417293. http://www.readon9.com/oblomov-ivan-goncharov?page=0,9
    consulted on 15 February 2017
  12. ISBN 0792328086
    .
  13. JSTOR 4543969
    .
  14. JSTOR 2249751
    .
  15. ^ in Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, eds. Newen, de Bruin, & Gallagher. Oxford University Press, 2017
  16. ^ "kant -". 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved 17 January 2021.
  17. ISBN 978-0-7391-1789-7
    .
  18. ISBN 978-0-19-251641-1
    .
  19. JSTOR 23317546
    .
  20. ISBN 978-3-11-061555-5
    .
  21. ISBN 978-1-317-43331-6
    .
  22. ISBN 978-0-8383-1941-3
    .
  23. JSTOR 40921955
    .
  24. ^
    ISBN 978-1-139-48743-6
    .
  25. ISBN 978-0-7876-2673-0
    .
  26. ^ Taylor, Robert Bruce (1923). Ancient Hebrew Literature. J.M. Dent. p. 3.
  27. ^ Office, Library of Congress Copyright (1931). Catalog of Copyright Entries. New Series: 1930. Copyright Office, Library of Congress. p. 448.
  28. ^ The Russian Student. Russian Student Fund, Incorporated. 1928.
  29. ISBN 978-0-521-31737-5
    .
  30. ^ See Garnett, p. 339
  31. ^ Office, Library of Congress Copyright (1965). Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series: 1963: July-December. Copyright Office, Library of Congress.
  32. JSTOR 10.5699/modelangrevi.113.1.0057
    .
  33. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 17 January 2021.
  34. ISBN 978-1-4128-5383-5
    .
  35. JSTOR j.ctt13wzxvp
    .
  36. ^ Wood, James (10 June 2001). "Hypocrisy and Its Discontents. (Review of The Golovlyov Family)". The Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, California, US. pp. 10–11 Book Review. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  37. ^ Eight Great Russian Short Stories. Fawcett Publications. 1962.
  38. ISBN 978-0-299-15134-8
    .
  39. Newspapers.com Open access icon
    .
  40. S2CID 154758166
    .
  41. ^ Duddington, Natalie (1943). A First Russian Reader (in Russian). G.C. Harrap & Company Limited.
  42. ^ Bulletin of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Published for the Association at Columbia University. 1952.
  43. ^ Circular. United States, Department of the Interior, Office of Education. 1930.
  44. ^ Henley, Norman (01/01/1960). ""Lev Tolstoy, Selections", Natalie Duddington and Nadejda Gorodetzky, eds. (Book Review)". The American Slavic and East European review (1049-7544), 19 (1), p. 620.
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