Schwartz was born and raised in Ohio and began studying French as a child. She studied Russian and Spanish at Harvard as an undergraduate before completing a Master's degree in the Slavic Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1975.[4] During this time, she co-translated her first published translation, An Otherworldly Evening by Marina Tsvetaeva, with Russian professor Richard D. Sylvester. After a year in Austin working on an unpublished translation, she moved to New York to work as an assistant editor for Praeger Publishers on a series of Soviet-focused publications. Another editor at Praeger put Schwartz in touch with a newly started publishing company looking for translators. The book, a translation of the seven-essay collection Vekhi, was published as Landmarks by Karz Howard in 1977.
While perusing the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library, Schwartz began identifying ignored and overlooked women writers that formed the basis for an anthology of 20th-century women writers, both within the Soviet Union as well as émigrée authors. This work became the foundation for her first fellowship from the NEA and the start of her career as a freelance translator.
In 2015, Schwartz published her translation of Anna Karenina (Yale University Press), shortly after Rosamund Bartlett's translation appeared from Oxford University Press. The two translations were often compared in the way they addressed Tolstoy's "rough" language, with Bartlett proposing that Tolstoy was "often a clumsy and occasionally ungrammatical writer, but there is a majesty and elegance to his prose which needs to be emulated in translation wherever possible". However Schwartz's point, as reviewer Masha Gessen described, was that "Tolstoy's writing is indeed remarkable for its purposeful roughness, the use of repetition, and the obsessive breaking of clichés to force the reader to consider the meaning of each word and phrase".[7] In her introduction to the text, Schwartz notes:
English translators have tended to view Tolstoy's sometimes radical choices as 'mistakes' to be corrected, as if Tolstoy, had he known better, or cared more, would not have broken basic rules of literary language.
Selected bibliography
Berberova, Nina (1987), The Accompanist, London: Collins, ISBN9780002231602
Berberova, Nina (1989), The Revolt, London: Collins, ISBN9780002234375
Berberova, Nina (1991), The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories, New York, NY: Knopf, ISBN9780679402817
Berberova, Nina (1998), The Ladies from St. Petersburg: Three Novellas, New York, NY: New Directions, ISBN9780811213776
Berberova, Nina (1999), The Book of Happiness, New York, NY: New Directions, ISBN9780811214018
Berberova, Nina (1999), Cape of Storms, New York, NY: New Directions, ISBN9780811214162
Berberova, Nina (2001), The Billancourt Tales, New York, NY: New Directions, ISBN9780811214810
Berberova, Nina (2005), Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg, translated by Sylvester, Richard; Schwartz, Marian, New York, NY: New York Review Books, ISBN9781590171370
Berberova, Nina (2021), The Last and the First, London: Pushkin Press, ISBN9781782276975
Bulgakov, Mikhail (2008), White Guard, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN9780300151459
Panyushkin, Valery (2011), 12 Who Don't Agree, New York, NY: Europa Editions, ISBN9781609450106
Peskov, Vasily (1994), Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family's Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness, New York, NY: Doubleday, ISBN9780385472098
Radzinsky, Edvard (1992), The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, New York, NY: Doubleday, ISBN9780385423717
Sarabianov, Dmitri V.; Adaskina, Natalia (1990), Liubov Popova, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, ISBN9780810937017
Slavnikova, Olga (2010), 2017, New York, NY: Overlook, ISBN9781590203095
Slavnikova, Olga (2019), The Man Who Couldn't Die, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, ISBN9780231185950
Shishkin, Mikhail (2012), Maidenhair, Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, ISBN9781934824368
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (2017), March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, vol. 1, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN9780268102678
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (2019), March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, vol. 2, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN9780268106850
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (2021), March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, vol. 3, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, ISBN9780268201708
Steinberg, Mark (2001), Voices of Revolution, 1917, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN9780300101690
Tolstoy, Leo (2014), Anna Karenina, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN9780300203943