C. J. Hogarth

Charles James Hogarth (1869-1945) was a British soldier and prolific translator from Russian, who wrote as C. J. Hogarth. He translated work by writers including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Goncharov, Ivan Shmelev, Ivan Nazhivin, V. O. Klyuchevsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Alexandra Kollontai.

Life

Hogarth was born on 7 December 1869, and educated at Charterhouse School. He joined the Highland Light Infantry in 1890, but retired in 1891. In 1900-1901 he fought in the Second Boer War for the 1st Railway Pioneer Regiment, Scott's Sharpshooters and the Cape Special Police. By 1904 he was living in Scarborough.[1]

He died on 5 April 1945.

Reception

Semion Rapoport caustically noted the propagandistic tone, "in the best style of the year 1914", of Hogarth's translation of Ivan Shmelev's The Sun of the Dead (1927), which anachronistically substituted "German hordes" for Shmelev's "German". Rapoport was also severe in his criticism of a 1915 translation of Gogol's Dead Souls (a credit sometimes printed as "D. J. Hogarth"):

Mr. Hogarth has a very poor knowledge of Russian but a rich fancy (I believe he, too, is a novelist), and decorates Gogol with such ornaments of style as to make him unrecognisable [...] It would be necessary to copy out practically his whole translation of Gogol's work to point out all the absurd additions and errors which it contains, as it contains them on every page.[2]

Hogarth's version of V. O. Klyuchevsky's five-volume History of Russia has been called "a very poor English translation".[3] His 1915 translation of Goncharov's Oblomov "sounds very British and contains inaccuracies.[4]

Selected translations

References
  1. Charterhouse register, 1872-1900. Godalming, Stedman. 1904. p. 220.
  2. Rapoport, Semion (1928). "Translations and Translators". Contemporary Review. 13: 500–508. Cited in May, Rachel (1994). The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. Northwestern University Press. pp. 35, 172. ISBN 9780810111585.
  3. Robert Auty; Dimitri Obolensky, eds. (16 July 1981). Companion to Russian Studies: Volume 1: An Introduction to Russian History. p. 184. ISBN 9780521280389.
  4. Galya Diment, ed. (1998). Goncharov's Oblomov: A Critical Companion. p. 189. ISBN 9780810114050.
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