Constance Garnett was well regarded 80 years ago, very much less so now.
She was not rigorous, would drop entire words or phrases she didn't understand. She worked at breakneck speed with minimal thought to trying to capture idiom or literary devices. This is especially bad with an artful writer like Chekov.
I knew a translator who worked for the EU high commission as a live translator. I asked her about translating books: "Knowing two cultures and languages in such intimate detail that you can know a book and translate it in any meaningful way for the princely sum of ten thousand pounds...no".
She compared it to poetry, you agonise over certain phrases and the thousands of years of history that phrase has and all its cultural meaning and all you've got is "he bonked him on the head".
She conceded that any translation was better than none as there are ideas out there, hidden, that need to spread and are limited only by language and time.
I see your point, but I don't think saying that "any translation is better than none" invalidates criticism of any specific translation. It's still possible for a translation to be better or worse than other translations.
I guess my point was more that most translations are done very quickly and relatively poorly because the commission paid for translation work is pitiful. Great translations are often labours of love for academics and amateur scholars.
Opinions are divided concerning Garnett. I don't speak Russian but what I have read is that she does an excellent job translating the tone and meaning though there are mistakes and omissions (as you say). Many of the most famous Russian writers were highly influenced by Dickens and Trollope and she preserves that influence.
Also, keep in mind that Russian literature gained its reputation in the English speaking world via Garnett. Hemmingway read Garnett.
> she does an excellent job translating the tone and meaning
I really can't agree with this. Her translation work was journeyman level at best. I've read most of her translations, and they simply do not convey the magical soul of Chekhov's prose very well. Nothing is going to replace reading it in the original language, but Pevear and Volokhonsky get far closer in my opinion. Constance Garnet's translations still stick around largely because they are now free.
All of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are stilted in a modernist kind of way. They read like experimental prose. I like experimental prose and I find P&V readable but I have a very hard time believing that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov all wrote in the same stilted, modernist style.
As I said, the reputation that Russian literature has in the English speaking world is mostly due to Garnett's translations. If nothing else, her translations are beautiful.
From the linked article:
> What differentiates Chekhov from other story writers is his fineness of perception, his ability to discern the subtlest emotional shades, and his appreciation of “the elusive beauty” of human experience. In the story “Strong Impressions,” the hero learns “that the same word has thousands of shades of meaning according to the tone in which it is pronounced, and the form which is given to the sentence.” And that is why one should never read any translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They translate literary masterpieces word by word, with no appreciation of what the author is trying to accomplish or what makes a great work extraordinary. If Pevear and Volokhonsky had done the King James Bible, Cain would have asked whether he was his fraternal sibling’s custodian. With Chekhov, their approach is especially unfortunate. He is all nuance, and they are all bluntness.
> Some fifty years ago, Ann Dunnigan did the best versions of Chekhov’s plays and of some of his stories. For the rest, the versions of Constance Garnett, all thirteen volumes of which were reprinted in 1986, remain, despite some lapses, impressive in their sensitivity to tone. I have cited their translations in this essay. Just as there is no point in reading a translation of a comic novel that loses the humor, so Chekhov can be appreciated in English only when a translator can catch the fine shades of his stories’ elusive beauty.
She was not rigorous, would drop entire words or phrases she didn't understand. She worked at breakneck speed with minimal thought to trying to capture idiom or literary devices. This is especially bad with an artful writer like Chekov.
There's a quite fascinating discussion of this in the forward to the Norton collection of Checkov (https://wwnorton.com/books/Anton-Chekhovs-Selected-Stories/).