Natalie Duddington
Natalie Duddington | |
|---|---|
| Born | 14 November 1886 Voronezh, Russian Empire |
| Died | 1972 Haringey, England |
Download books of Natalie Duddington or buy them on amazon
Natalie Duddington (14 November 1886–1972) was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie (with an h).
Biography[edit]
Born Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, she was the elder daughter of the Russian novelist and short-story writer Alexander Ertel. Natalie was a particularly intelligent child, treated by her parents very much as an adult from the age of 12. When Constance Garnett came to visit Ertel in the summer of 1904,[1] she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England. She obtained a first-class degree in Philosophy at University College London in 1909.[2]. 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 S.L. Frank)[3].
Through her interest in Theosophy, Natalie met John (aka Jack) Nightingale Duddington, who had been appointed Rector of Ayot St Lawrence in 1905. His wife refused to follow him there from his previous incumbency – she preferred to live with another woman – and he divorced her in 1911.[4]. Jack and Natalie fell in love and they became life-long partners, having two children: Anna (born 1913) and Alexander (always known as Sasha; 1921–1998). Although their children bore the name Duddington, Natalia and Jack did not actually marry until 1954.
Translating[edit]
From the moment Natalie arrived in England in 1906, she rapidly became indispensable to Constance Garnett, whose eyesight was very poor, for her translations from Russian. Natalie would read her the Russian text, sentence by sentence, and write down the English translation to Constance’s dictation.[5] She elucidated difficult passages and supplied background information as only an educated Russian could; thus the final version was the result of close collaboration between the two of them. When their translation of The Cherry Orchard was questioned in 1911, Constance swore that she and Natalie, who had compared their English version with the original, word for word, could vouch for it being faithful and correct. Their opinions on most things – religion and politics, to start with – were widely different, but when it came to Russian literature, they were of one mind. Natalie was one of very few people of whom Constance could say that their minds met, and they became life-long friends.[6]
Natalie greatly admired Dostoyevsky’s novels and successfully campaigned for their translation. Heinemann gave Garnett a contract at the end of 1910,[7] 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 Natalie was closely involved with about half of them. When Garnett's productivity eased off after 1920, Natalie 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."[8]
In the early years, Natalie relied on her partner Jack to 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 Natalie’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.”[9]
Between them, Natalie and Garnett introduced to English readers all those great Russian works, from The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina to The Cherry Orchard, that had such an impact on British readers and British writing in the twentieth century.
Philosophy[edit]
Natalie had an enduring interest in philosophy. 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[10]. In 1918 she read a paper on "Our Knowledge of Other Minds" to the Aristotelian Society.[11]. 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?"[12] Both pieces are remembered and cited (see Joel Krueger on "Direct Social Perception"[13]) to this day: "her two essays on our knowledge of others’ minds are great fun, in both style and substance. They bear the imprint of the Oxford Realist conception of knowledge and give expression to one powerful source behind the claim that our knowledge of others’ minds is perceptual" — Anil Gomes, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford and an Associate Professor in Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Oxford, January 2017.[14]
In an article on "New Russian Philosophy" in The New Atlantis for January 1934, Natalie discussed works by several Russians, including Etika Preobrazhennogo Erosa (1931) by the exiled Russian philosopher Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtzev (1877–1954).[15] (She translated the title as "Ethics of the Transfigured Eros".) Unfortunately the second word in the Russian title, "Preobrazhennogo", was mis-printed "Preobrazhennavo". A poem by Hugh MacDiarmid appeared in the same issue of The New Atlantis; he obviously read Natalie's article, for when he subsequently titled one of his poems "Etika Preobrazhennogo Erosa" (in Stony Limits), he repeated the mistake. Vysheslavtzev’s philosophy, or at any rate Natalie’s account of it, "is relevant primarily to the poem’s references to spiritual aspiration and the sublimation of the self in a larger force." [16]
An article on “The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov” appeared in The Hebbert Journal (5, 1916–17), signed J. L. Duddington. (That this is Natalie's work is confirmed by a manuscript in The New Atlantis Foundation Dimitrije Mitrinović Archive at the University of Bradford: "‘The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyof’ by Mrs J.N. Duddington (Nathalie A. Ertel).") Another article, "The Philosophy of N. Lossky", appeared in the Dublin Review (1933, Volume 192).
Her name also appears in the list of contributors to volume 4 of The Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Education by Professor Foster Watson (1922).
English translations solely by Natalie[edit]
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: an essay on moral philosophy. 1918
- Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge: an epistemological inquiry. 1919
- Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, The Last Days of Tolstoy. 1922
- Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, December the Fourteenth. 1923
- Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, The Birth of the Gods. 1925
- Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank, God with Us: Three Meditations. 1926
- Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, Akhnaton, King of Egypt. 1927
- Anna Akhmatova (i.e. Anna Andreyevna Gorenko), Forty-Seven Love Poems. 1927
- Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter and other stories. 1928 (The other stories are "The Queen of Spades"; "Dubrovsky"; "Peter the Great's Negro"; "The Station-Master" and "The Snowstorm")
- Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky, The World as an Organic Whole. 1928
- Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov. 1929
- Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, Michael Angelo and Other Sketches. 1930
- Ivan Sozontovich Lukash, The Flames of Moscow. 1930
- Viktor Pavlovich Kin, Over The Border. 1932
- Nikolay Onufriyevich Lossky, Freedom of Will. 1932
- Tatiana Tchernavin, Escape from the Soviets. 1933 ("translated by N. Alexander"[17])
- Tatiana Tchernavin, We, Soviet Women. 1935 ("translated by N. Alexander") (The American edition of 1936 has no comma in the title.)
- Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man. 1937
- Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev, Anna. 1937
- Lev Aleksandrovich Zander, Dostoevsky. 1948
- Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Smoke. 1949
- Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, A Solovyov Anthology 1950 (includes The justification of the good: an essay on moral philosophy)
- Lev Aleksandrovich Zander, Vision and Action. 1952
- Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Golovlyov Family. 1955[18]
- Alexander Ertel, The Specialist and A Greedy Peasant in Eight Great Russian Short Stories. 1962.
- Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank. Reality And Man. 1965
- Russian Folk Tales from the collection made by Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev, 1967
- Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky, A Course in Russian History. 1968 (repr. 1994)
Books edited and/or compiled[edit]
- A First Russian Reader. 1943
- Intermediate Russian Reader. 1949
- Russian short stories: XIXth century (an "Oxford Russian Reader") 1953
- Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Selection. 1959
References[edit]
- ↑ Garnett, Richard (1991). Constance Garnett: a heroic life. Sinclair-Stevenson. p. 211. ISBN 1856190331. Search this book on
- ↑ Garnett p. 250
- ↑ Wolff, Jonathan. "Philosophy at University College London since Bentham". UCL. Retrieved 16 August 2017.
- ↑ National archives case J 77/1037/1434 at Kew, dated 20 March 1914
- ↑ Garnett p. 251
- ↑ Garnett p. 252
- ↑ Garnett p. 259
- ↑ 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
- ↑ Introduction to Goncharov, Ivan (1992). Oblomov. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 9. ISBN 9780679417293. Search this book on http://www.readon9.com/oblomov-ivan-goncharov?page=0,9 consulted on 15 February 2017
- ↑ Waithe, Ellen (1994). A History of Women Philosophers. Vol. 4. Kluwer. p. 335. ISBN 0792328086. Search this book on
- ↑ Duddington, Nathalie (1918). "Our Knowledge of Other Minds". Mind. 19: 147–178. JSTOR 4543969.
- ↑ Duddington, Nathalie A. (1921). "Do we know other minds mediately or immediately?". Mind. 30 (118): 195–197. JSTOR 2249751.
- ↑ in Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, eds. Newen, de Bruin, & Gallagher. Oxford University Press, 2017
- ↑ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/kant/
- ↑ Nathalie Duddington, "New Russian Philosophy", The New Atlantis, 1.2 (January 1934)
- ↑ Michael Whitworth, "Forms of Culture in Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa'", International Journal of Scottish Literature, issue five, Autumn/Winter 2009, p. 3
- ↑ See Garnett, p. 339
- ↑ 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.
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Natalie Duddington. |
Category:Alumni of University College London Category:English translators Category:Russian–English translators Category:1886 births Category:1972 deaths Category:Translators of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Category:Translators of Leo Tolstoy Category:20th-century British women writers Category:19th-century British women writers
This article "Natalie Duddington" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Natalie Duddington. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
|
This page exists already on Wikipedia. |
