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.
Zabel Yesayan, @anahitoferebuni, originally for 
Punctured Lines 