Rosemary Edmonds

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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.

Biography

Rosemary Dickie was born in London, grew up in England, and studied English, Russian, French, Italian and Old Church Slavonic at universities in England, France and Italy. She married James Edmonds in 1927. The marriage was later dissolved.[1]

During World War II Rosemary Edmonds was translator to General de Gaulle at Fighting France Headquarters in London, and after Liberation, in Paris.[2] After this Penguin Books commissioned a series of translations from her. Tolstoy was her speciality.[3]

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

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

Larissa Volokhonsky.[4] 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".[5]

Translations

See also

References

  1. Independent.co.uk. Archived from the original
    on 10 October 2017. Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  2. ^ Her biography in the Penguin Classics translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
  3. Independent.co.uk. Archived from the original
    on 10 October 2017. Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  4. ^ Dessaix, Robert (21 April 2001). "Anna Karenina..." Lingua Franca. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  5. ISBN 9780521169219
    .

External links
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