Category: Translated Literature

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

Olga Tokarczuk Wins the Nobel Prize

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

The Nobel winners have been announced and Olga Tokarczuk of Poland has won for 2018 (there was no prize given out last year because the Swedish Academy was mired in a sexual assault scandal; with the announcement of the winner for 2019, it quickly became mired in a genocide denial scandal). Tokarczuk is the author of Flights (trans. Jennifer Croft), which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones; both out from Riverhead Books).

You can read Tokarczuk’s statement about receiving the prize here: https://lithub.com/read-olga-tokarczuks-response-to-winning-the-nobel-prize/

And here is an excerpt from Flights: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/olga-tokarczuk-flights/

2019 Warwick Prize in Translation, Long List

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

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)

Yuri Tynianov’s Permanent Evolution

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

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.”