The promised Friday afternoon update:
The final tally, as of January 3, is 32 books. (If, that is, I counted correctly!) That’s the same number we ended up with last year. And it’s a pleasant surprise.
This year’s titles are so self-explanatory that the list doesn’t require much analysis. Perhaps what interests me most about this year’s list is something else that comes as no surprise at all: the fact that so many of the books are somehow connected with Ukraine and that so few are contemporary fiction. Once again, there are lots of classics on the list and it’s nice to see a couple of children’s books. Of these 32 titles, 19 were written by men, 12 by women, and one by a large selection of poets.
My usual cautions remain so I’ll just copy last year’s, with a small edit:
As for disclaimers, caveats, and other details, I’m sure I missed some books, perhaps even a lot of books. As in years past, I’ve included books of all genres and ages. Please add a comment or e-mail me with changes/errors or additions; my address is on the sidebar. NB: Though I generally list only new translations (including retranslations), I do occasionally allow a few reprints and reissues. I’ll place a link to this post on the sidebar of the blog for easy future reference. I’m already taking names and titles for 2025, so please start sending them in. Finally, don’t forget the Self-Published Translation post, here: If you have a book to include, please add it in a comment on that page and I’ll be happy to approve it.
I clearly still have not started posting regularly again, though I thought a lot in 2024 about options for doing so. Nothing, however, felt quite right, though who knows when I might read a book that tells me I need to return to regular blogging... Whether I do or not, I want to thank all of you (yet again) for reading my Lizok posts. I also want to repeat something I wrote on New Year’s Eve in 2023: Meetings with many of you, be they in person, in Zoom meetings, or over email, are part of the pleasure of being a translator.
Thank you for that. Again, here’s wishing you lots of good reading in 2025!
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And so, another year, another list of translations! I’m doing something a bit different this year: I’m posting the entries that I have today – and wishing you a happy (still-not-quite-here-in-my-time-zone) 2025 – but I’ll finish the list by Friday. This 2024th year has been full of surprises right up until the very end so checking the rest of the publishers on my list has been the last thing on my mind! It’s hard to say how much I’ll find given that there are already nearly 30 titles on the list and last year’s total was 33.
If you’re a translator, writer, publisher, or other interested party who has a book to add to the list, please either email me (see sidebar for address) or add a comment and I’ll be sure to include the book.
And so (take two!), I’m off for now, to eat, read, and sit by the fire. I’ll add more entries as well as a bit of analysis (though I think the trends are pretty clear this year) and my “usual cautions” for the list within the next few days!
Here’s wishing everyone good health, good reading, and a more peaceful world in 2025.
Here’s the list of translations for 2024:
Aylisli, Akram: People & Trees: A Trilogy, translated by Katherine E. Young; Plamen Press.
Buzina, Varvara: Far & Away: Tales from Rural Russia, translated by Liv Bliss; Russian Life. With illustrations by Asya Lisina.
Ehrenburg, Ilya: Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya; Smokestack Books, March 2024.
Fadeeva, Olga: Water: Discovering the Precious Resource All Around Us, translated by Lena Traer; Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers.
Gogol, Nikolai: And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, translated by Oliver Ready; Pushkin Press.
Gordeeva, Katerina: Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Penguin Random House (imprint: WH Allen).
Gorky, Maxim and Scherr, Barry P.: The Old Man and The Counterfeit Coin: Two Plays, translated by Barry P. Scherr; Slavica Publishers. Slavica lists this as Scherr’s book but two plays is enough for me to put it on the list under Gorky (this is a translation list, after all!) along with Scherr’s name.
Ivanov, Alexei: The Food Block, translated by Richard Coombes; Glagoslav.
Khlebnikov, Velimir and Apollinaire, Guillaume: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New, translated by Robert Chandler; Pushkin Press.
Kurkov, Andrey: The Silver Bone, translated by Boris Dralyuk; MacLehose Press.
Luboshinsky, Vera: The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky (1938-1945), edited and translated by Dušan Deák and Rowenna Baldwin; Oxford University Press.
Navalny, Alexei: Patriot, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Daiziel; Penguin Random House (imprint: Bodley Head).
Panaeva, Avdotya: The Talnikov Family, translated by Fiona Bell; Columbia University
Press. I have a copy of The Talnikov Family and need to get on it,
particularly since Fiona Bell’s translation looks very good.
Panyushkin, Valery: Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War, translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner; Europa Editions.
Pereverzin, Vladimir: The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin’s Russia, translated by Anna Gunin; Gemini Books/Ad Lib Publishers.
Podoroga, Valery: Mimesis: The Literature of the Soviet Avant-Garde, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov; Verso.
Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades, translated by Anthony Briggs; Pushkin Press.
Rafeyenko, Volodymyr: The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad, translated by Sibelan Forrester; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (Rafeyenko now writes in Ukrainian.)
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail: Foolsburg: The History of a Town, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Vintage (Penguin Random-House). (This is the novel known as simply История одного города, literally The History of a Town, in Russian.)
Samarqandi, Shahzoda: Mothersland, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Three String Books/Slavica Publishers. Mothersland was written in Tajik and Shelley translated the book from Yultan Sadykova’s “lyrical Russian” (as the book’s “about the translators” section calls it) translation of the book, titled Земля матерей. (This is another book that I have and need to finally read!)
Shaloshvili, Natalia: Miss Leoparda, translated by Lena Traer; Enchanted Lion Books.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press.
Sorokin, Vladimir: Blue Lard, translated by Max Lawton; New York Review Books.
Sorokin, Vladimir: Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, translated by Max Lawton, New York Review Books.
Stiazhkina, Olena: Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Anne O. Fisher; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Stiazhkina, Olena: Cecil the Lion Had to Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (This book apparently begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian.) Bonus: Here’s an interview with Olena Stiazhkina, thanks to PEN America.
Tsvetaeva, Marina: Three by Tsvetaeva, translated by Andrew Davis; New York Review Books.
Tsvetaeva, Marina: The Scale By Which You Measure Me: Poems 1913-1917, translated by Christopher Whyte; Shearsman Books.
Teffi: And Time Was No More, translated by Robert Chander; Pushkin Press.
Various: Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya; Slavica Publishers. Translators Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Dmitry Manin, and Josephine von Zitzewitz also worked on this bilingual edition. Thank you to Asymptote for publishing this piece about Dislocation. I attended an online reading earlier this year and it was painful, very moving.
Various: Lectures on Analytical Mechanics, translated by O.V. Karpushina and V.G. Serbo; Oxford University Press. We cover all genres here! The authors are G.L. Kotkin, V.G. Serbo, and A.I. Chernykh.
Zavalinsky, Igor: A Dream of Annapurna, translated by Michael and Jonathan Pursglove; Glagoslav.
Disclaimers and Disclosures. The usual. I know many of the translators, authors, and publishers whose work is on this list. Some of these books were provided to me by publishers, authors, literary agents.
