While in England, Duddington began to assist
Constance Garnett, whose eyesight was very poor, in making translations from Russian. Duddington would read her the Russian text, sentence by sentence, and write down the English translation to Constance's dictation. She elucidated difficult passages and provided background information; thus the final version was the result of close collaboration between the two of them. Natalie was one of very few people of whom Constance could say that their minds
met, and they became life-long friends. Duddington greatly admired
Dostoyevsky's novels and successfully campaigned for their translation.
Heinemann gave Garnett a contract at the end of 1910, and by 1920 they had completed all twelve volumes, about two-and-a-half million words in all. In the end, Garnett translated around seventy Russian literary works, and Duddington was closely involved with about half of them. When Garnett's productivity eased off after 1920, Duddington undertook more than two dozen works by herself. Among the writers that she translated,
Nikolai Berdyaev,
Semyon Frank, and
Nikolay Lossky were intellectuals expelled by the Bolsheviks from Russia in 1922 on what is known as the
Philosophers' ships. Lossky was personally known to her: "Through 1920 and 1921, at the height of the famine which killed millions on the lower Volga and thousands in the cities, [the Lossky family] survived only with the help of food parcels sent by . . . Natalie Duddington." Her partner, Jack, initially helped check that her English was idiomatic; in fact some of her first translations were actually attributed to him. (For instance, in 1908 the Stage Society put on
The Bread of Others by
Turgenev, "translated by J. Nightingale Duddington" – who at this point knew no Russian.) Richard Freeborn, emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London, wrote of Duddington's translation of
Oblomov, for instance, that "in its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of
Goncharov's Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance, it has about it a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original." Duddington was the first to translate several works by Russian authors into English, including
Ivan Goncharov's
Oblomov,
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's
The Golovlyov Family, and a volume of
Anna Akhmatova's
Forty-Seven Love Poems. Her obituary in
The Times wrote that she deserved "much of the credit for spreading an appreciation of Russian literature in England." == Philosophy ==