Alma Strettell

Alma Gertrude Vansittart Harrison (née Strettell; 1853–1939) was a British translator and poet known for her translations of folk songs, folk tales, and poems from Greek, Romanian, French, Provençal, German, Norwegian, and other languages.

Early life and family

Alma Gertrude Vansittart Strettell was born 1853, in Genoa, Italy, the daughter of Laura Vansittart (née Neale) and the Reverend Alfred Baker Strettell, the British consular chaplain in Genoa, and subsequently the rector of St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury. Strettell was brought up in Italy, and only moved to Britain in 1873 after her older sister, Alice Comyns Carr married and moved there, later becoming a costume designer and a leader of the Artistic Dress movement there.

In 1890, Strettell married Lawrence Alexander "Peter" Harrison (1866–1937), an English painter, and continued to publish under her maiden name. They had three children.

Literary career

Strettell established a reputation as a translator with some forty translations that she contributed to the 1889 volume Selections from the Greek Anthology. She is one of only five translators named on the title page. Over the subsequent decades of her career, critics complimented her on her "genius for felicitous paraphrases" from foreign languages and on her ability to make her translations sound as if they were originally written in English.

Two years later, she collaborated with Elisabeth of Wied, Queen consort of Romania, who published under the pen name Carmen Sylva. Together they translated the Romanian-French writer Elena Văcărescu's Romanian folk songs into English under the title The Bard of the Dimbovitza. The book proved popular and went through multiple reprints over the next decade, with selections being set to music by such composers as Charles Griffes, Arnold Bax, and Arthur Foote. They later (1896) collaborated on a second volume of translations, this time of folk tales.