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Rosemary Lilian Edmonds, néeDickie (20 October 1905 – 26 July 1998), was a British translator of Russian literature whose versions of the novels ofLeo Tolstoy have been in print for 50 years.
Rosemary Dickie was born in London, grew up in England, and studied English, Russian, French, Italian andOld 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 toGeneral de Gaulle atFighting France Headquarters in London, and after Liberation, in Paris.[2] After thisPenguin Books commissioned a series of translations from her. Tolstoy was her speciality.[3]
Her translation ofAnna Karenina, entitledAnna Karenin, appeared in 1954. In a two-volume edition, her translation ofWar and Peace was published in 1957. In the introduction she wrote thatWar and Peace "is a hymn to life. It is theIliad andOdyssey 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 ofAlexander Pushkin andIvan Turgenev.
Later in life she released translations of texts by members of theRussian Orthodox Church. In 1982 her translation of theOrthodox Liturgy was published by theOxford University Press, "primarily for the use for theStavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex". She had learned Old Church Slavonic to complete the project.
The Australian criticRobert Dessaix thought Edmonds' version ofAnna Karenina, though not entirely satisfactory, reproduced Tolstoy's voice more closely than that ofRichard Pevear andLarissa 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 bythe Maudes", though he found her "sometimes lax about detail".[5]
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