Wind-Blown in Milwaukee: The 2014 ALTA Conference

The most exciting item to report from the 2014 American Literary Translators Association conference is that a translation from the Russian—Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, and published by New York Review Books—won the National Translation Award (NTA). Yankelevich accepted the award, saying he and Ostashevsky were “grateful on our authors’ behalf.” Yankelevich read several poems from the book as well as a statement from Ostashevsky, who selected poems for the collection and wrote its introduction but couldn’t come to Milwaukee. NYRB sent me a copy of An Invitation for Me to Think when the book was released last year, I’ve heard Yankelevich read from it twice now, and I’ve picked up the book several times to read poems, Ostashevsky’s introduction, and even the notes in the back. But I seem to lack the vocabulary to write about my thoughts and/or feelings about the poems—not surprising, perhaps, since the topics of бессмыслица (meaninglessness/absurdity/nonsense to borrow from Ostashevsky’s introduction) and “How do you write in a language that is false?” came up in Yankelevich and Ostashevsky’s comments at ALTA—so will simply recommend them (the poems, that is, not my thoughts and/or feelings) and, of course, this compactly complete book, by saying that these translations are starkly and strangely beautiful and moving. “Rug Hydrangea,” which Yankelevich translated, particularly gets me. The Lucien Stryk Prize, which recognizes translations of Asian poetry or Zen Buddhism into English, went to Jonathan Chaves for Every Rock a Universe—The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing, (Floating World Editions, 2013), which features works by Wang Hongdu.

One of my favorite aspects of ALTA is hearing other translators speak about techniques for solving stubborn problems. I’ve heard Bill Johnston speak two or three times now about his translations from the Polish. This year, in a panel on translating point of view, Johnston offered examples from his translation of Wiesław Myśliwski’s A Treatise on Shelling Beans, another NTA finalist. Johnston’s introduction on his hand-out describes the book as “a first-person narrative with a concrete yet mysterious addressee/imagined interlocutor.” (Variations on this point of view seem to be surprisingly common.) Many of the (translated) sentences Johnston bolded in his examples involved, in some way, “you,” and his comments on little things—like translating the Polish “pan” as “sir” in the beginning of the book, to establish a sense of the second person plural/formal “you” that exists in Polish but not in English—offer great models for Russian, too. Johnston’s reading from the book, during a lunchtime event, was equally instructive: he’s a master at creating and maintaining voices.

A panel called “Translation in Particular Genres” focused solely on translation to and from Russian and English: Boris Dralyuk, Sibelan Forrester, and Olga Bukhina spoke about specific challenges of specific works. Dralyuk discussed his translation of Dmitry Usov’s “Переводчик” (“The Translator”), a poem discovered by Mikhail Gasparov that offers a translation within a translation. Forrester talked about her work on poet Maria Stepanova’s prose, “Conversations in the Realm of the Dead,” noting the challenge of translating a poet’s prose; Forrester mentioned her use of Marina Tsvetaeva and Susan Sontag as models, too. It was also fun to hear from Olga Bukhina, who translates from English to Russian, about the difficulties she faced with Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, a book set in nineteenth-century Texas that features a cotton gin and lots of vetch, neither of which translates easily into Russian. Bukhina also looked at issues of noun gender that apparently (and logically!) vex the English-to-Russian translator as much as the Russian-to-English translator.

There was, as usual, a good Russian presence at the conference so lots of translators read from their Russian-to-English translations during Bilingual Reading sessions. There were so many fun and beautiful readings that it’s not fair to pick out highlights but, well, I’ll pick a few anyway: Danuta Borchardt’s soft voice and soft humor in her reading from her translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk; Tanya Paperny’s rendition of the bull’s speech from Nikolai Kostomarov’s story “Скотский бунт,” thought by some to have been appropriated by George Orwell for Animal Farm (FMI: John Reed on the subject; Paperny’s translation will be included in an e-book Reed is working on); Marian Schwartz’s crystalline new beginning to Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Jane Bugaeva’s delightful (no other word will do!) translations of poems by Oleg Grigoriev. I read from my translation of Evgeny Vodolzakin’s Laurus. I’ll also use this opportunity to mention that one of my favorite performances during the ¡Declamacion! readings, which must be memorized, was Sibelan Forrester and Christina Kramer’s rendition of Pushkin’s “Я вас любил,” sung to the tune of “Danny Boy.” I have no idea how that worked out so perfectly but it was lovely. I recited two poems: Vyacheslav Kupriyanov’s “Русский вопрос” (“A/The Russian Question”), which consists solely of lines with two names, Kalashnikov and Baryshnikov, and a poem by Grigorii Petukhov that begins by referencing “The Internationale.”

I could go on and on, listing more readings and fun(ny) comments and useful ideas from panels and roundtables—editing, translation as betrayal, and marketing were especially lively topics—but I’ll stop there. I should add that we Russian translators are already talking about having a Russian translation workshop next year: this wouldn’t be a workshop in the traditional sense but more a forum for sharing ways we’ve (re)solved sticky translation problems. If you’re a Russian translator who missed ALTA this year but want to come next year or didn’t talk with me in Milwaukee about this potential workshop, please send me a note. The 2015 conference will be in Tucson, which ought to be a bit warmer than ear-freezing but (otherwise) hospitable Milwaukee.

The Annunciation, c. 1490-95
Sandro Botticelli (with assistance?)

Also, on a cultural note: I spent part of my last day in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where I thoroughly enjoyed a real coffee and “Of Heaven and Earth,” a visiting exhibit of Italian painting from Glasgow museums. I went specifically to see the pieces from the Middle Ages…

P.S. I hope I didn’t spell any names incorrectly... there are so many in this post and I’m still so tired!

P.P.S. I spent this afternoon at my local library for a screening of the documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, with the film’s co-directors, Sarah Wallis and Paul Mitchell. You can watch it, too, on YouTube. Even if you won’t be able to ask the directors questions, you’ll still get Stephen Fry’s readings of excerpts from several novels—set to wonderful animated segments—as well as interviews with writers including Zakhar Prilepin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The very last minute or two, with Vladimir Sorokin, jolted me yet again, even on my third or fourth viewing.

Other pieces about the conference:
Tanya Paperny about Politics and Transaltion, on Words Without Borders
Susan Bernofsky/Translationista on What I Learned at ALTA 2014

Up Next: Big Book Award winners on Tuesday. And then books galore, probably starting with Viktor Remizov’s Ashes and Dust, a very worthy Big Book finalist about poachers and corruption in the taiga.

Disclaimers: The usual. I collaborated on a story that will appear in an upcoming NYRB book.

A Ridiculously Long & Terribly Inelegant Potpourri: Awards, Events & Conference with Book Fair in Boston

Awards first: Irina Povolotskaya won the Belkin Prize earlier this month for her Пациент и Гомеопат (The Patient and the Homeopath). And Academia Rossica announced this week at the SLOVO festival that Pola Lem won the Rossica Young Translators Award.

On to conference with book fair: I went to slushy Boston earlier this month for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. The AWP conference is a gigundo event that’s as impersonal as the organization’s name… though I did enjoy a few of the panels and, of course, the book fair, which included lots of small presses and journals. Some conference highlights… for writing technique: Peter Elbow’s talk “The Wisdom of the Tongue: Harnessing the Music of Speech for Good Writing,” looked at intonation units in speech and gave me some great theory to back up my practices for translating dialogue. I can see why one writing teacher told me Elbow’s considered a rock star in the field; I was only too happy to order up his Vernacular Eloquence… for translation: panels on Polish poetry, where it was fun to recognize commonalities with Russian, and hearing James Ragan read from and speak about his translations of poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ragan said he never stops worrying that he missed something or somehow failed… for disappointment: the lowestlight of the conference was that the room for the panel “Opening Her Veins: Variations on Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva in Two Voices” was so far beyond SRO that I couldn’t even stand in the hallway to hear the speakers. On the bright side: of course I’m very happy Tsvetaeva is such a draw!

The book fair gave me a bunch more entries for past, present, and future translation lists, so I’ve already made some updates to the 2012 and 2013 lists and started thinking about 2014. A few to mention… New York Review Books will publish a new Krzhizhanovsky collection (translator, Joanne Turnbull) in October and a new Pushkin collection (translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) next year… A Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, has a lovely illustrated edition of three Chekhov stories, About Love, translated by David Helwig… Northwestern University Press publishes quite a few translations of Russian-language books and had many on display, including copies of Anne O. Fisher’s translation of Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs, Diane Nemec Ignashev’s translation of Victor Martinovich’s Paranoia, as well as a bilingual book of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work that includes translations by Robin Kemball. And I bought Erik Butler’s translation (from the Yiddish) of Der Nister’s Regrowth… It was also nice to see Zephyr Press’s books: Zephyr has a huge selection of translations by Central and East European authors, mostly poets published in bilingual editions… One of my favorite books I brought home came from the people of Merriam-Webster, who gave me the Dictionary of English Usage for my reference shelf… On a non-Russian note, I’m also excited about Lionheart, James Anderson’s translation of Thorvald Steen’s Norwegian-language novel, which University of Chicabo Press/Seagull Books gave me… I brought back two huge stacks of books so will stop there.

Alexander Vvedensky

Off-site events were the real highpoint of AWP, perhaps because they were planned by organizations not called AWP. An evening-with-poetry in a restaurant, for example, included readings of Danuta Borchardt’s translations of Cyprian Norwid and Barbara Siegel Carlson’s translations of Srečko Kosovel… as well as my introduction to a Russian theater in the Boston area, Theater on the Roof. An event with St. Petersburg Review that began with readings by Kadija George, Brian Sousa, and Irina Mashinski was a great opportunity to finally meet Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, the editors of Rasskazy, in real life. Parker and Maria Gusev, who was also in Boston, are translating Zakhar Prilepin’s San’kya. My favorite event, though, was a reading at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, where translators read from new collections from New York Review Books. Don Share read from Miguel Hernández and Matvei Yankelevich read from An Invitation for Me to Think, a book of translations of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry for which Eugene Ostashevsky is listed as selector and primary translator, with Yankelevich providing additional translations. Edwin Frank, NYRB’s editorial director, likened the books to “poetry baseball cards,” fittingly so since the books are small and brightly colored, with a “collect them all” feel. Titles like “Stomach Rumbling During Confession of Love” are certainly memorable.

As for coming events: anyone in the New York area interested in hearing Ostashevsky and Yankelevich read their translations of Vvedensky—and/or Share reading his translations of Hernández, which I also enjoyed—is in lots of luck. Read Russia is hosting a book launch party on March 27 for An Invitation for Me To Think. Then NYRB will host four related events in April; three will focus on the Russian Avant-Garde and OBERIU. (NYRB April event calendar) Speakers will include Ostashevsky and Yankelevich, plus Richard Sieburth, Michael Kunichika, Bela Shayevich, Ainsley Morse, and Kirill Medvedev. A special note on Kirill Medvedev: I bought It’s No Good, an English-language collection of Medvedev’s writings, from Ugly Duckling Presse at the AWP book fair and couldn’t put it down during my Amtrak ride home. The book is described as including poems, essays, and actions; it’s translated by Keith Gessen (who also wrote an introduction) with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich. Gessen writes in his introduction, “I don’t know if our translations can capture the honesty, transparency, and passion of Medvedev’s writing, both in his essays and in his poems, but we’ve tried.” I’ve only read teeny snippets of Medvedev’s poetry in Russian and haven’t compared translations with originals but as I read I could certainly feel all the things Gessen was hoping to capture. And a lot more. Here are three reviews of It’s No Good that help explain: New York Times (Dwight Garner), Los Angeles Review of Books (Jeff Parker), and Three Percent (Will Evans).

Though I’m sorry none of these events are close enough for my calendar, I have a great consolation prize: Dina Khapaeva will speak about “When Dostoevsky’s Nightmares are Coming True: Gothic Aesthetics in Contemporary Russian Society” at Bowdoin College on March 27. I’ve read and enjoyed chunks of Khapaeva’s very engaging Кошмар: литература и жизнь (Nightmare: Literature and Life)—she covers writers including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Pelevin—so am looking forward to her talk. Maybe I’ll even write about it.

Up Next: Igor Savelyev’s Tereshkova Flies to Mars, a noughties novel known as Mission to Mars in English: Amanda Love Darragh’s translation will be out this summer from Glas. And then Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which brings me back to the Middle Ages in just the right way.

Disclaimers: The usual. In addition to the books I mentioned receiving from publishers at no charge, NYRB sent me a review copy of the Vvedensky book; I am collaborating on a story that will appear in a book that NYRB will publish.