“The text of Anna Karenina is like a Persian carpet of intricate symmetrical design, whose workmanship can only be appreciated by seeing the reverse side.”
In the spring of 2015 I had the pleasure of chairing Rosamund Bartlett‘s event at the Oxford Literary Festival in which she talked about Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, and the experience of producing the first new translation of the novel for Oxford World’s Classics in almost a century.
The summer before, I visited Rosamund at home in Oxford to talk to her about her translation. This was one of the first recordings I made in an irregular, but ongoing, series of Conversations with Translators. Like many translators, Rosamund told me that she never set out to become a translator and was quite surprised to have become one; as you’ll hear in the interview, it was her fascination with Chekhov that led her down this path.
In the interview we also talked about how Rosamund came to translate Tolstoy’s great novel, what the challenges were, and what she learned along the way. But to begin at the beginning, when we met on a hot July afternoon back in 2014 I first asked Rosamund to tell me how she became a Russianist…