C. J. Hogarth


Charles James Hogarth 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 Shmelyov, 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.
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 Shmelyov's The Sun of the Dead, which anachronistically substituted "German hordes" for Shmelyov's "German". Rapoport was also severe in his criticism of a 1915 translation of Gogol's Dead Souls :
Hogarth's version of V. O. Klyuchevsky's five-volume History of Russia has been called "a very poor English translation". His 1915 translation of Goncharov's Oblomov "sounds very British and contains inaccuracies".

Selected translations