Tag: Literature in Translation

Lizok’s Bookshelf: Yasnaya Polyana Finalists, 2019

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Previously, we posted Lisa Hayden’s blog post about the longlist for this prize, noting the gender disparity in terms of who is nominated for and, especially, awarded Russia’s literary prizes. The shortlist just came out and out of the six nominees, one is a woman. Of course, no one is suggesting nominations and/or awards should be based on gender alone nor is this meant to disparage the quality of the other nominated titles in any way. But it is important to note the imbalance, and even more so, to keep asking what can be done about it.

http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/09/yasnaya-polyana-finalists-2019.html

Unfortunately, I Care: Joanna Chen Interviews Olga Livshin (BLARB)

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Read Joanna Chen’s beautiful and insightful interview with poet and translator Olga Livshin about her just-released book A Life Replaced: Poems with translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman:

“And so for me, even when I write in English, it’s as if I am writing in Russian because I’m releasing something that was the first fourteen years of my life, it’s like I carry this genie inside me and I need to let it out occasionally. Let it walk around a little before I bottle it back up.” https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/unfortunately-care-joanna-chen-interviews-olga-livshin/

Yelena Furman on Elena Chizhova’s “Little Zinnobers”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“The English-language translation of The Time of Women, by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas, came out in 2012 from Glagoslav Publications, who have now released Chizhova’s earlier novel Little Zinnobers (Kroshki Tsakhes, 2000). Translated by Carol Ermakova, the volume includes a translator’s note and a very useful critical essay by Rosalind Marsh.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/torn-like-a-veil-before-me-on-elena-chizhovas-little-zinnobers/

Yelena Furman on Alisa Ganieva’s “Bride and Groom”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“ALISA GANIEVA’S APPEARANCE in the world of Russian literature took everyone by surprise, in the literal sense. A critic by training, she published her first work of fiction, the novella Salam, Dalgat! (Salam tebe, Dalgat!), when she was 25, under a male pseudonym; when the novella received the Debut Prize in 2009, Ganieva outed herself as a woman at the awards ceremony.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-voice-from-the-caucasus-on-alisa-ganievas-bride-and-groom/

 

Yelena Furman on Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s “City Folk and Country Folk”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“IN HER INFORMATIVE introduction to Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk, Hilde Hoogenboom writes, ‘In the 1860s […] Russia had its own trio of writing sisters. Like the Brontës, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters wrote under male pseudonyms, endured hardships, and lived in the provinces.’ The analogy is fitting, but, as Hoogenboom notes, only to a point: ‘The Brontë sisters became well known not long after their deaths, [but t]he story of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters remains to be told.'”  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dont-we-know-our-own-minds-a-rediscovered-russian-woman-writer-of-the-19th-century/

Yelena Furman on Elena Chizhova’s “The Time of Women”

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

“THE TIME OF WOMEN is Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas’s translation of Elena Chizhova’s 2009 Russian Booker-winning novel Vremia zhenshchin. (Modeled on the Booker Prize in Britain, the Russian Booker is given to the best Russian-language text; Chizhova had been nominated for the award twice before). Set in Chizhova’s native St. Petersburg, mostly in the 1960s, when the city was known as Leningrad, this most beautiful, yet most maddening city emerges as a central focus of the narrative, as it often has in Russian literature, from Gogol to Dostoevsky to Andrey Bely.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/soviet-scars-yelena-furmans-the-time-of-women/

How Should We Review Translations? Part I

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

The beginning of an important, thoughtful, and often maddening conversation by Asymptote journal about the state of translated literature in the U.S. and the role of reviewers writing about it. Shocker: there is relatively little international literature being translated, published, reviewed, and read in this country. There is even less by women/non-Western European writers. A question we have been asking ourselves, each other, and anyone who would listen is what can be done about changing this situation. It is one of the main reasons we started this blog. This is a collective endeavor, which doesn’t have a simple answer. Suggestions welcome.

“For instance, only six of the nearly one hundred books reviewed on my watch were written by African writers. A whole 17% were translated either from Spanish or French. Moreover, only 16% were books of poetry rather than prose […] exactly two thirds of contributors to the Criticism section were men, and […] close to two thirds of the authors reviewed were men.”

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2019/09/23/how-should-we-review-translations-part-i/?fbclid=IwAR3Qh_3jCPSwCo2iXqO9vSZ2Pb_Wdra4rCt7r5ds4BQvGY0pkrOkRbaul54