Category: Translated Literature

Looking Back on Our First Event: Participatory Reading in Post-Soviet Literatures, in Pictures

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

On November 25th, Punctured Lines hosted our first literary event in San Francisco. Thanks to a conference that brought to San Francisco scholars, translators, and writers in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, we were able to gather a star list of participants. A few of the readers have appeared in Punctured Lines, and we certainly hope to feature more of their work. Following the scheduled portion of the event, we hosted an open mic that turned out to be a great crowd-pleaser. Below are the pictures we captured that night and brief descriptions of everyone’s contributions.

Shelley Fairthweather-Vega opened with an excerpt from her recently published translation of Talasbek Asemkulov’s novel A Life at Noon — available for purchase here. A story about a musician growing up in Soviet Kazakhastan and learning his art form from his father.

Yelena Furman read the opening from her short story “Naming,” recently published in Narrative Magazine, and available in full online (free, with free registration required).

Wayne Goodman read a few brief excerpts from his historical novel Borimir: Serving the Tsars that re-imagines gay romance in Imperial Russia. There’s lots of awkward flirting! This book is available for purchase on Amazon.

Maggie Levantovskaya read from her essay about a trip to Auschwitz concentration camp “To Conjure Up the Dead,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review. The bizarreness of Holocaust tourism with the post-Soviet twist. An excerpt from this essay appears online.

Dmitri Manin wore the T-shirt with Genrikh Sapgir’s poem on the back, and read to us his translations from Sapgir’s “Poems on Shirts” book. We have published three of these translations in an earlier post.

Masha Rumer shared an essay about exposing an unsuspecting date to the delights of pickled herring-and-boiled beet salad, aka “Seledka pod shuboj.” He lived long enough to propose. We’re hoping to read the follow up on this story in her upcoming book, Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting. More about Masha and her book in the Q&A she gave Punctured Lines.

Sasha Vasilyuk followed with an excerpt from her novel-in-progress about a Soviet prisoner of war. We will be following the development of this project closely.

Mary Jane White delighted us with her translations from Marina Tsvetaeva — her delivery of the “Ode to the Rich” landed particularly well with our audience. Mary Jane’s book of her own poetry and translations from Tsvetaeva Starry Sky to Starry Sky is available online. We will be following up with news of her upcoming book of translations from Tsvetaeva’s Berlin and Prague years, Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End, and New Year’s.

I read the opening of “Rubicon,” a short story from my collection Like Water and Other Stories.

Josie von Zitzewitz followed up on the thread of discussion about the lack of visibility of contemporary Russian literature in the United States, and introduced a project that she’s developing with Marian Schwartz and Hilah Cohen, soliciting work from young Russophone writers to create a feature publication in an American magazine (possibly more than one).

Joining us for the open mic portion of the show, we had Maxim Matusevich, a writer and a historian of USSR intersections with African countries. He delivered an excerpt from his hilarious short story about cultural encounters between American students going to study abroad in St. Petersburg.

Christopher Fort closed the evening with a poem that he read in both Uzbek and English, bringing our attention to a particular rhyming pattern of Turkic languages. We have previously linked to Christopher’s interview about translating Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon novel Night and Day. This novel is now available for purchase online.



Overdue Praise for Karolina Pavlova’s Work

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Karolina Pavolva was born in 1807 in Yaroslavl, Russian Empire, and published her novel A Double Life in 1848. This year, 171 years after the original publication, Columbia University Press gave this book a new life by releasing Barbara Heldt’s translation in their stellar Russian Library series.

The publisher calls the book “an unsung classic,” and I’m so pleased to see that this book is receiving the attention it deserves. In November, Talia Zax wrote a wonderful review of it for The Atlantic:

The slim mixed-genre novel . . . follows the 18-year-old Cecily von Lindenborn as her mother attempts to find her a husband. Cecily’s days, written in prose, are filled with the pleasures of a rotely feminine aristocratic life: romance, balls, and new dresses. But at night, her dreams are narrated in poetry, sensual verses with an intense pull toward the natural world. Pavlova constructed a strikingly prescient psychological vision: a mind responding to extreme social pressure by slowly and completely separating itself into parts, but giving few external indications of change.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/11/karolina-pavlova-double-life-translated-barbara-heldt-review/601342/

Pavlova had a long and underappreciated career in Russia as a poet, and I’m very pleased to share a recent translation of her poem “Moscow” by Katherine E. Young. (Scroll down to the third entry.)

Genrikh Sapgir’s Sonnets: A Performance from ALTA

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

On November 9th, 2019, Olga Livshin, Dmitri Manin, and I hosted an off-off-site at ALTA (American Literary Translators Conference) in Rochester, NY. Olga Livshin introduced A LIFE REPLACED, her hybrid collection combining own and translated poems; and I introduced LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, my English-language collection of fiction. Both books deal with issues around parent and children relationships, immigration, and processing the complex inheritance that we brought to the US from the Soviet Union.

To open the evening, we staged a brief performance of Dmitri Manin’s translations from the work of Genrikh Sapgir. A Soviet Jewish poet, Sapgir combines a whimsical imagination with the sharp eye for telling details. Watching this video a few weeks after the performance, I’m surprised to see how effectively Sapgir’s images and Dmitri Manin’s words helped us to recreate a certain spirit of the late Soviet Union, a kind of festive carnivalesque environment in the face of increasing challenges of everyday life and crumbling social structures. Obviously, none of us are trained actors, but we all reveled in the performative aspect of Sapgir’s work.

These poems come from Sapgir’s book “Sonnets on Shirts” that was first published outside of the Soviet Union, in Paris in 1978. Dmitri Manin is working on translating the complete manuscript, and we’re publishing these sonnets in English with his permission.

Thanks to Shelley Fairweather-Vega for recording the performance, and to our lovely and supportive audience! The sonnets below are reproduced in the order in which they appear in the video.

Sonnet of Things Gone Missing

To Ian Satunovsky

At times there is — no beef or ham or cheese
Now hats are gone from store shelves everywhere
But I have known calamities to spare
No place to live. No health. No relatives

No happiness no moral sense no peace
For one’s own labor no respect nor care
No warm and comfy place to take a piss
No prospects for a harvest come next year

But there are FISH-BASED MEATBALLS in a can
And goals — both hazy and utopian
Betrayal cosmos vodka boredom missiles

There’s forest, steppe, construction and ballet
And even people — somewhere far away
And God’s my witness! — though God’s also missing

Something — Nothing

A metaphysical sonnet

A sphere swings. Towards the sphere
A sphere swings. Where they meet, they all
Collapse: one — a pair, one — a pair, one — a pair
We watch from a spherical mirror hall

Everything’s a reflection. A ball or a troll
A thing or a cloudю It swells like a nightmare
Then without a crash… a ball disappears a ball disappears a ball disappears
Gobbled up by a ball

Streaking and splitting they fold and go —
In the third — in the tenth — all the host to the faux
Infinity: one after the next the next the next the next the next the next the next the next the next the next etc.*

Stop it! Enough! I can’t stand this ordeal!
A ball on a thread in an infinite reel —
A universal game on a childish pretext

*The line stretches to a misconceived infinity. 

Chart of Life

Three wise old men bent over to review
A chart of life in their benevolent wisdom
“He’ll be a poet… under socialism…”
“A wretched fate, indeed” said Lao Tzu

So I was born here not without a reason…
Wartime… cat scavenging the yard for cukes…
Oppression by the bastards and the crooks…
The tedium was stifling like a prison!

And suddenly — a trip to Singapore
On this sweet break from the routine and chore
I saw a mural in a Buddhist temple

On which among pagodas and bamboo
Three wise old men bent over to review
A chart of life and smiled around the table

A recap of the Russian-language panels from the American Literary Translators Conference #ALTA42

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

At the beginning of November 2019, the American Literary Translators Association hosted its annual conference in Rochester, NY. This annual conference is a delightful opportunity to hear about issues that concern translators across the board, and also to dive deeply into conversations about specific language tracks. We asked Dr. Muireann Maguire and Dr. Cathy McAteer, attending from the UK, to share Twitter log of their conference experience.

Drs. Cathy McAteer and Muireann Maguire’s visit to the conference was in conjunction with the project they’re running at the University of Exeter. It’s called RusTrans: ‘The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland and the USA’ (Horizon 2020, Grant Agreement No.: 802437). This project looks at the practice of translation as a political activity, “often subverted by ideological prejudice or state interference.” They are using very creative and unexpected ways to analyze this political side to translation, looking at the reception of Russian literature in (primarily) English-speaking countries.

To learn more, please visit their gorgeous website. Their project email is rustrans.exeter.ac.uk and twitter handle is @Rustransdark.

Friday 08th:

First #alta42 session of the afternoon: slavic bilingual readings. We’re kicking off with Jim Kates’s reading of Aigerim Tazhi’s Kazakh poetry.

Next up, Bulgarian. Izidora Angel reading her translation of Nataliya Deleva. Sounds fabulous in the original!

Tatiana Samsonova reading an excerpt and her translation of a novella by the Georgian-born, Canada-living writer Elena Botchorishvili

A vibrant, colourful reading. Feels like USSR meets Laura Esquivel. Excellent. I’ll look forward to reading more back home #ALTA42

Fabulous and courageous impromptu poetry recital, Chukovsky’s Мойдодыр becomes ‘Gotta Scrub’. Anna Krushelnitskaya, good luck with your pitch! #ALTA42

#ALTA42 cold readings at the Rochester spirit room bar

Saturday 09th day at ALTA42:

At the #ALTA42 independent presses’ round table with editors from (left to right from second left)@FeministPress @NewDirections @CatapultStory and@nyrbclassics. They all welcome direct submissions from translators – hoping they get out of this room alive!

Acquisitions editor for @nyrbclassics being honest – “interesting manuscripts come in every day. They are a joy, but we are few, and sometimes we just cannot make a decision quickly. It takes about two years just to fit a new publication into our schedule”.

Reminiscing the fall of the Berlin wall, a significant moment in our lives #ALTA42

And now it’s@OlgaLivshin‘s turn to take the stage with #translations of Akhmatova, Gandelsman and her own poetic treats. And the audience keeps growing! #ALTA42

It was great. Well done @bowlga! I loved the short story about you staying at your grandmother’s in Karelia 🙂 Lovely to have coincided with you here!!

Sunday 10th: A bumper day for Russian!

Gilded Cage tweets

And now for something really special! Russian fiction outside its gilded cage with @mbs51, @Hilah_Kohen, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, and Olga Bukhina. #russianliterature #translation #ALTA42

Intro by Marian Schwartz:

We (Russian literary translators) have very poor visibility, we don’t publish with the publishers that win prizes, our books don’t make it to the shortlists

Russian literature is a “goldmine, not a golden cage”, says Olga Bukhina (far right) at the #ALTA42 “Russian Fiction Out of Its Gilded Cage” panel. Shelley Fairweather-Vega (far left) is about to talk about Uzbek and Central Asian authors.

First up, Olga Bukhina discussing the explosion of #YAfiction in Russia in last 10yrs and its invisibility outside of Russia in #translation #ALTA42

Translation publishing of #YAfiction still can’t resist a #Russian stereotype even tho there’s a huge cohort of Russian writers for teens, writing about normal, everybody kids

And now Shelley Fairweather-Vega speaking about her work translating #Russian, #Uzbek, #Kazakh literature into English. Complexities include relay translation, language overlap, no publishing infrastructure (beyond a Sovietised Writers’ Union). Fascinating!

And now it’s @Hilah_Kohen speaking about new writers, new media: examining how we serve the writers we have, what writers publish outside of print, how they shape a persona digitally and using which media. An #alta42 tour de force!

The Politics of Being Heard

Our panel started by going back in time for an overview of who translated and published what and why and when. Muireann started proceedings: she examined the political reasons behind Ireland’s era of translating Russian literature into Irish in the early 20th century, and homed in on the translation career of a young Irish woman called Daisy Mackin who had spent time in Stalin’s Russia and translated Turgenev and Chekhov for the Irish Free State’s literary translation project An Gum.

Cathy shifted the historical focus to the mid-twentieth century, examining Penguin’s contribution to Russian literature in Anglophone translation. She introduced the Penguin Russian Review, with its pro-Russian sentiments, the Penguin Russian Classics and the translators who aspired to project a more accurate image of Russia abroad via translation, and Penguin’s role in publishing Soviet literature: the (expensive and hasty) race to publish Solzhenitsyn.

Boris succeeded in succinctly summarising all eras of Russian literature in translation(!), reminding us that the first copy of Gogol’s Dead Souls was wrongly but quite deliberately depicted as real life, and that the doyenne of Russian literary translation Constance Garnett herself had been galvanised to become a translator because of the highly politicised Russian company she kept in London. Boris neatly brought us back to the present day with his thoughts on where Russian literary translation is currently at, and how the translator (rather than the author) can be a vehicle for selling books; trust in the translator can be all the encouragement a devoted reader needs to try an author they’ve never read before.. which led nicely to Kate Young’s overview of the industry today…

Kate discussed her own proximity to the politics of being heard, touching on the role her translation has played in publicising Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli’s Farewell, Alys. Kate had also gathered a breadth of views from (absent) Ruth Akhmedzai Kemp and Lisa Hayden who both had observations and questions about the Russian literary translation industry. Discussion ranged from extolling the good work of small publishers and exploring reasons why big publishers are cautious to commission contemporary Russian literature (it’s the Classics that keep on selling!); the role of agents, prizes, and how maybe the time has come for publishers to set aside some of the funds for supporting bigger translation samples, in other words: compensating translators while they prepare for a pitch.

The @ExeterModLangs #RusTrans team, Dr@MuireannMaguire and Dr@CathyMcAteer1, presenting on our panel #ThePoliticsOfBeingHeard at #ALTA42 with translator and editor Boris Dralyuk and panel organiser, poet & translator Katherine Young.

Recently Published: Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

In May, Zephyr Press and publisher and translator J. Kates brought to us a collection of poetry by Aigerim Tazhi, a writer who lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan and writes in Russian. According to the Press’s announcement, “Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”

A beautiful bilingual book, produced with care and attention to white space around the poems, Paper-Thin Skin speaks to layers of loss–from personal and private to the loss of the country (I read these poems in the post-Soviet context) to climate change and the loss of habitats.

Translating Tazhi to English, Kates makes carefully weighted choices for clarity. In the example below, he changes the poet’s line “Чёрным вестям из нечёрного ящика” — literally “Black news from the not-black box” to read “At dark news from the bright box,” making sure that the English-speaking reader will understand the image of television. He makes this change with attention to the rhetoric device that the poet employs and finding an opportunity to create a sense of parallel and contrast in the image.

Pub Date: May 21, 2019

Publisher: Zephyr Press

Translator: J. Kates

The book has been reviewed by Eric Nguyen in Empty Mirror, Peter Gordon in Asian Review of Books, Alison Mandaville in World Literature Today, Zaure Bataeva on her blog.

7 Russian Booker Prize winners and their must-read novels

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

There has been a lot of talk, including on this blog, about literary prizes, translation, and gender imbalance. The Russian Booker Prize is one of the country’s most prestigious awards. The writers in the title have had their winning novels translated into English, and there is also a list of other winners whose novels haven’t been translated but with links to their translated shorter works. Of the seven writers in the title, three are women: Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Kukotsky Enigma (2001, trans. Diane Nemec Ignashev); Olga Slavnikova, 2017 (2006, trans. Marian Schwartz); and Elena Chizhova,The Time of Women (2009, trans. Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas; my review here). But no prizes for guessing whether this relative gender balance holds true for the Russian Booker overall.

https://www.rbth.com/arts/331193-russian-booker-prize-winners

NYC, October 30: Meet Jill! a bimonthly Women+ in Translation reading series

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

http://www.penandbrush.org/event/jill-reading

We love to see the growing momentum for the conversation about gender in translation. We particularly love to see how creative these initiatives have been.

A New York City group is starting up Jill!, a bimonthly Women+ in Translation reading series that spotlights women or nonbinary translators or translators of women or nonbinary authors (or both!).

The inaugural reading will take place this coming Wednesday, October 30th, at 7 pm. Location: Pen and Brush. 29 East 22nd street, New York, New York 10010.

The readers will be: Charlotte Whittle, reading work by the mid-century Argentinian avant-garde novelist and poet Norah Lange; Hilah Kohen, reading from a narrative poem by contemporary Russian author Lida Yusupova; and Larissa Kyzer, reading an excerpt from the novel A Fist or a Heart by Icelandic poet, playwright, and novelist Kristín Eiríksdóttir.

For more details and full bios, check out announcement on Pen and Brush’s website. RSVP on Facebook.

The NOS(E) Award’s 2019 Longlist

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Thank you, as always, to Lisa Hayden of Lizok’s Bookshelf for keeping us all up to date on prize-related announcements. We are happy to share the list here, particularly as it contains her very helpful, and entertaining, descriptions of the nominated works. Less happy is the subject we’ve talked about previously on this blog (and which, in the wake of the Nobel, some of us have debated in a – let’s go with “spirited” – manner on Twitter): of the sixteen titles, only three are by women. While no one in their right mind would suggest that gender should be the sole criterion for anything, really, there is a real issue with Russian literary prizes being overwhelmingly skewed toward male writers (googling the major award winners will confirm this in short order). This is not meant as a slight to any of the men on the list, but it is a question that needs to be asked, over and over, until we arrive at a workable solution: how do we honor good writing whoever the writer may be while at the same time ensure more balanced representation in terms of nominations and winners? Suggestions welcome; perhaps someone can forward them to the Russian prize committees.

http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-nose-awards-2019-longlist.html

A Soviet YA Classic: Aleksandra Brushtein’s Дорога уходит в даль (The Road Goes off into the Distance)

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

It is hard to overstate just how much Aleksandra Brushtein’s autobiographical novel about Aleksandra (Sasha) Yanovskaya, a young Jewish girl growing up in Vilna at the turn of the century, was beloved by generations of Soviet children. At a time when I have completely forgotten plots of books I read much later, I can still recall various episodes from this one. A copy of the book, which my family took with us when we left the Soviet Union, is one of my prized possessions. My mom loved this book so much she wanted to name me Sasha (an attempt ended by my great-grandmother Aleksandra’s announcement post my birth that Ashkenazi Jews cannot name children after living relatives). A remarkable thing about this novel is that it has a Jewish protagonist and depicts Jewish life but still became so popular in a country as anti-Semitic as the Soviet Union. Its popularity has endured in contemporary Russia, where “since 2005, a new printing of the book by different publishers has appeared almost every two years,” including an annotated edition.

Yet as Liza Rozovsky’s article notes, Brushtein “is barely known outside the Russian-speaking world.” To date, there is no English translation. If there is a translator out there who could take on this project, many in the diaspora would be eternally grateful on behalf of their children and their English-speaking friends’ children. In any case, it’s great to see this book being written about at length and we — and our inner younger selves — are thrilled to highlight it on Punctured Lines.

“The book that is imprinted in my memory as a moral and political compass, and the book I would like my children to know, is a Soviet-era work for children and juveniles titled “The Road Slips Away into the Distance.” It’s an autobiographical trilogy by the Jewish children’s playwright and memoirist Aleksandra Brushtein, who is barely known outside the Russian-speaking world. The first volume of the work was translated into Hebrew in the 1980s, but Brushtein (1884-1968) remains unknown in Israel, too. In the Soviet Union, where it ran through many editions of tens of thousands of copies each, the trilogy achieved cult status.”

The Novel That Introduced Soviet Jews to Their Forgotten History

Yelena Furman on Ksenia Buksha’s “The Freedom Factory”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“A NOVEL ABOUT a Soviet military factory whose workers must eventually adjust to a post-Soviet way of life does not sound like a thrilling read. Yet there’s a very good reason why Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory (Zavod “Svoboda”) won Russia’s National Bestseller Prize in 2014 (Buksha is only the second of three women to do so since the prize’s founding in 2001) and was also a finalist for the Big Book Award. In the author’s hands, this unpromising raw material is skillfully transformed into a genuinely and unexpectedly compelling narrative.” 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shintity-fug-these-vulstes-on-ksenia-bukshas-the-freedom-factory