This is a very astute and much-needed book for anyone who is interested not only in ‘Russian Bloomsbury’ and more general issues of literary translation, but also in what, in the end, significantly informed and shaped the writings of two female writing giants of that period: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

Based on her extensive archival research, Davison convincingly argues that Woolf and Mansfield undertook their collaborations with Koteliansky with the utmost seriousness, that they read and analysed his first drafts ‘scrupulously, not only to normalise language but also to further their own understanding of Russian literature’, and that their own ‘heavily annotated drafts’ make it obvious that ‘they were certainly not just correcting howlers’ (37).

The best way to summarise Translation as Collaboration is by borrowing the title of its concluding chapter, ‘Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction’, since the book definitely has these three distinct parts. It starts with a very painstaking analysis of the translations that Woolf and Mansfield worked on in collaboration with Koteliansky, and considers how these differ from other available translations of the same works. Davison here also defends Koteliansky and his ‘literal’ initial versions against the critics (including myself) who agree with D. H. Lawrence (his best co-translator, in my opinion) that they were at times much too ‘crude’ (113). She points out that the English of Koteliansky's letters is much more smooth and idiomatic than the English of his translations and suggests that his literalness was therefore intentional and ‘driven by conviction and integrity rather than disdain for English style’ (23). Davison also gives examples of debates raging at the time – and today – about over-polished translations ‘kill[ing] the spirit of the original’ (23). No one would seriously argue with the keenness of such an observation when applied to many translations, especially when one realises that in Constance Garnett's English renditions, for example, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky often sound alike (which, God forbid, they should not!) and much like Thackeray. And yet I still question the validity of Koteliansky's all-too-literal approach, which was particularly evident when he ventured into solo translations. One example, which I give in my recent book about Koteliansky, is where he describes a maid in a play by Zinaida Gippius as someone ‘with air, dry, imposing, wearing a cap’ and her nose as ‘red with the frost’ (A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, 126).