Author: Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.” Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.

2019 Warwick Prize in Translation, Long List

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We congratulate Lisa Hayden, whose translation of Guzel Yakhina’s novel Zuleikha has been included among thirteen books longlisted for the third annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. We love this book and we are delighted with this news.

Read the full announcement here.

The list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, is as follows:

· Brother In Ice by Alicia Kopf, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (And Other Stories, 2018)

· Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta, 2018)

· Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated from French by Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2018)

· Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tocarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)

· Katalin Street by Magda Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (Maclehose Press, 2019)

· Negative of a Dual Photograph by Azita Ghahremann, translated from Farsi by Maura Dooley with Elhum Shakerifar (Bloodaxe, 2018)

· People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle (And Other Stories, 2018)

· Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Little, Brown Book Group (Corsair), 2018)

· Season of the Shadow by Léonora Miano, translated from French by Gila Walker (Seagull Books, 2018)

· Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, translated from Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas (Peirene, 2018)

· The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)

· Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated from German by Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, 2018)

· Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)

Zhivago’s great passion inspires plagiarism row | News | The Sunday Times

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a bit of upsetting news. The Sunday Times (paywall) reports that Anna Pasternak, the author of Lara, a biography of Olga Ivinskaya, has accused Lara Prescott of plagiarism. Lara Prescott is the author of the recently published novel The Secrets We Kept that in fictional form follows the story of Olga Ivinskaya. Lara Prescott’s publisher is standing by her, and we will follow the story of the legal complaint as it develops, but I feel that the situation is unfortunate on many levels.

The story of Olga Ivinskaya, who was Boris Pasternak’s partner at the end of his life and through the writing of Doctor Zhivago, continues to fascinate writers and readers of Pasternak’s novel, in particular, for its parallels to that of Lara, the character of Pasternak’s novel. Olga Ivinskaya has told her story herself, in her memoir A Captive of Time that was translated to English by Max Hayward and published by HarperCollins in 1979, and there have been a number of retellings since then (not all of them translated to English).

Penguin Random House pointed out that the story of Olga Ivinskaya has been the subject of multiple books before Anna Pasternak’s, including Ivinskaya’s 1978 autobiography, a book by her daughter Irina Emelyanova, and Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’s 2014 book The Zhivago Affair.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/01/lara-prescott-doctor-zhivago-boris-pasternak-plagiarism-penguin-random-house

One of the reasons I find the legal complaint unfortunate is because it carries on the notes of scandal and sensationalism, associated with Doctor Zhivago from the beginning. I fear that the book and the nuance of the stories of the women behind it get lost in the fray.

On the other hand, given this interest to her story, I do hope that Olga Ivinskaya’s book might see a new English-language edition. And, perhaps, an enterprising English-language writer will take up Zinaida Pasternak’s story. If we’re writing the story of the affair, Zinaida’s side of it is no less captivating than Olga’s.

New Book: Katia Raina’s Castle of Concrete

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Thanks to Lea Zeltserman and her Soviet Samovar newsletter for the mention of this novel. This is labeled as “Young Adult,” which means might fly under the radar when I look at reviews of contemporary fiction. This also means, it might be a gripping and fast-paced read. The description and preview of the first few pages are certainly promising.

Sonya is a daughter of a “dissident poetess moneyless famous jobless” mother, who had nearly aborted her. Jewish, too–being Jewish in the Soviet Union seems to be a major theme of this book. The novel takes place just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and emigration looms large. Sounds both familiar and intriguing.

Publisher: Young Europe Books

Agent: Jessica Regel

Yuri Tynianov’s Permanent Evolution

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Translators and scholars Ainsley Morse and Phillip Redko are bringing out a new volume of Yuri Tynianov’s work. Permanent Evolution contains his essays on literature, theory and film, many of which are translated here for the first time. Daria Khitrova of Harvard University penned the intro.

Publisher’s intro: “Yuri Tynianov was a key figure of Russian Formalism, an intellectual movement in early 20th century Russia that also included Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. Tynianov developed a groundbreaking conceptualization of literature as a system within—and in constant interaction with—other cultural and social systems. His essays on Russian literary classics, like Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and works by Dostoevsky and Gogol, as well as on the emerging art form of filmmaking, provide insight into the ways art and literature evolve and adapt new forms of expression. Although Tynianov was first a scholar of Russian literature, his ideas transcend the boundaries of any one genre or national tradition. Permanent Evolution gathers together for the first time Tynianov’s seminal articles on literary theory and film, including several articles never before translated into English.”

Russian Samizdat, Children’s Literature, and the Sunset Years of the Soviet Empire

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Olga Bukhina wrote a fascinating piece on the C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia in the Soviet Union. My parents were regular consumers of Samizdat, but I don’t remember seeing the Narnia books in their hands — perhaps, it’s the overtly Christian message that put them off. My parents weren’t interested in religion or science fiction, but I was, and just a few years later I devoured Lord of the Rings when it was officially published in 1991. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that my parents read it without my knowledge. Parents are apt to do things like that…)

https://childlitassn.wixsite.com/intlcommittee/single-post/2019/09/25/Russian-Samizdat-Children%E2%80%99s-Literature-and-the-Sunset-Years-of-the-Soviet-Empire

Narnia was not just a religious threat; in the Soviet context, it was clearly political. The message of these fairytales turned out to be much more dangerous than particular words and images that could be eliminated by censorship. The words of the faun Mr. Tumnus, “It is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long… Always winter and never Christmas; think of that,” in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2001, p. 118), resonated to the reader as an image of the Soviet political winter without any hope for change; the change being symbolized by Christmas.

Emerging Translators Reading

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ALTA, American Literary Translators Association hosted a virtual reading with three translators who are completing their yearlong program as mentees of exprienced translators working in the field.

This recording offers a unique opportunity to get an early glimpse into stories that hopefully will eventually become books. Fiona Bell is working from Russian on translating Natalia Meshchaninova–a contemporary filmmaker who also published a book of autobiographical stories–in this excerpt, the narrator tells of her teenage experience of keeping a diary, the way she constructs her self on paper, based on examples from her reading more (in particular, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer — a novel that was spun off from the Twin Peaks series!).

Mirgul Kali, translating from Kazakh, reads an excerpt from Mukhtar Magauin’s novella Kokbalaq, that tells of a life of a traditional Kazakh musician in the Soviet Union, and from this excerpt we get to understand something of his relationship with his art. In the interview after the reading, Mirgul talks about learning from this book about her own culture and all the reading she needed to do to convey the musical terms into English. The more I learn about her project, the more impressed I am with the amount of scholarship and thought that has gone into this translation.

Jennifer Kellogg reads to us from Book of Excercises II by a modern Greek poet, Geogre Seferis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. This book was published postuhomsouly in 1976, and most of the poems in this volume have not been translated to English until now.

Please enjoy and if you feel inspired, donate to ALTA to support this fantastic fellowship program.

Jennifer Eremeeva’s Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow

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As a response to our first publicity efforts for this blog, Yelena and I received a tweet from Jennifer Eremeeva, an expat who moved from the US to Russia. In 2014, she published a book of short stories about her protagonist, also named Jennifer, who was a Russia super-fan in the 1980s, started learning the language and traveling around the Soviet Union on the eve of its dissolution–then met a man she fell in love with, and married him, and ended up staying for twenty years.

I’ve just started reading this book on Amazon, and this seems a page-turner. Jennifer is a keen observer and a natural storyteller, with a sharp sense of humor and attention to the nuance of language and culture. And she’s got so many interesting stories to tell!

Author: Jennifer Eremeeva

Title: Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow

Publisher: Small Batch Books

Pub date: February 3, 2014

Interview with Sophia Shalmiyev

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Sophia Shalmiyev’s (Mother Winter) interview with Katie Collins Guinn in Nailed magazine is remarkable for the way it allows Shalmiyev’s voice to come through. There’s a sense of true intimacy between the interviewer and interviewee that allows us to dive deeply into Shalmiyev’s writing, and her relationship with art and family.

https://nailedmagazine.com/interview/interview-sophia-shalmiyev/?fbclid=IwAR1_sgQTU9vM5GGtlXjChEwPoMosghcxSX6G4GqjMVpqXyTEes_Q59sY1Zk

A fantastic read, this piece also offers us photographs of Shalmiyev’s art.

I have only wanted for women and girls to pick up the book and find other women to follow and emulate and try on and discover and research and then pass the torch. That was part of the goal. There are codes and messages in a bottle and secret passageways but nothing that’s sacred or hidden in a sadistic way. So much of the cannon is about saying that some piling on of allusions is sophisticated and enlightened and a test of whether you are in the club. I read a bunch of the club. I don’t hate it. Ezra Pound is problematic on so many levels but I did get what I needed from him. He is not my people. And so I wished to do something in the same vein but for my own tribe. Sappho is my mother. She is a legend because a stitching is performed around her words and persona every day. It’s a parallel process for me.

https://nailedmagazine.com/interview/interview-sophia-shalmiyev/

An early reader’s review of Hamid Ismailov’s Of Strangers and Bees in Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation

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David Chaffetz writes for Asian Review of Books:

“One could characterize the overall effect as Master and Margarita comes to the Uzbek Cultural Center of Queens, NY. The poet’s profusion of words underscores his passion for his experience as a child growing up in the fields of Transoxiana, the insouciance of being a state-sponsored intellectual, the desperation of being a stateless person in rigidly bourgeois Europe.”

Upcoming Book: Cold War Casual

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Anna Krushelnitskaya’s book, Cold War Casual/Простая холодная война is a bilingual work that collects oral testimony and interviews about the ways the events of the Cold War and the government propaganda affected people in the US and in the USSR. This seems of tremendous interest to all of us who have lived through that epoch and/or write about it.

Krushelnitskaya has translated the testimony and interviews so that each piece is available in both Russian and English. The announcement reads: “The interviews were conducted in the native languages of the respondents in a casual, friendly format to record the subjective evaluations of the Cold War period in an attempt to establish whether, and how, the lived experiences and memories of the respondents influenced their sense of national pride, instilled a fear of war or the enemy, invited cultural openness or isolation and participated in forming personal long-term ideological stances.”

This books is available for pre-order.

Pub date: October 22, 2019

Publisher: Front Edge Publishing, LLC