Translation Award News: AATSEEL & Read Russia/Anglophone

The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages announced the winner of AATSEEL’s annual translation award this weekend. The winner is Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Polina Barskova and including works by Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman. The translators are Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebekah Smith, Charles Swank, Jason Wagner, and Matvei Yankelevich. The book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and includes an introduction by Barskova and an afterword by Ilya Kukulin. Written in the Dark is a bilingual edition with endnotes. I have the book and have read quite a few of the poems. Yes, I recommend it, though I’m pretty inept at writing about poetry, so will leave details to Piotr Florczyk’s review for Los Angeles Review of Books, which includes this line about Gor’s poems, “For the most part untitled, and rhyming in the original Russian but less frequently in translation, these poems are surreal indeed, and even macabre.”

In other translation award news, Written in the Dark also made the shortlist for this year’s English-only Read Russia Prize for translation. The finalists are, in the order listed on the Read Russia site:

• Written in the Dark (please see extensive details above!)
• Rapture, by Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich), translated by Thomas J. Kitson; Columbia University Press.
• The Gray House (Дом, в котором), by Mariam Petrosyan, translated by Yuri Machkasov; AmazonCrossing.
• Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg; New York Review Books/Pushkin Press.
• Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Anastasia Tolstoy, Robert Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn, Ivan Juritz, Donald Rayfield, Boris Dralyuk, Justin Doherty, Dmitri Nabokov, Irina Steinberg, and Rose France; Penguin Classics.

Congratulations to everybody involved with all these books!

Up Next: The NOSE Award winner tomorrow. I was glad to see that Sorokin’s Manaraga, which I enjoyed, already won the reader’s choice award. Also: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, which I already mentioned enjoying very, very much. Some English-language titles. And the sequel to Yakovleva’s Tinker, Tailor, which has been just the sort of slow-action detective novel I needed for a busy time.

Disclaimers: The usual, in full force since I’ve collaborated with many of the translators and publishers on this list, not to mention Read Russia!