Women in Translation, 2020

August may be almost gone but it’s still Women in Translation Month for another day and a half, meaning I’m going to hop to it and write up a rather rambling post with some rather random bits of news about Russian books by women that are on their way to anglophone readers. “Random” really is the word here: this is a pretty nonmethodical (perhaps even slipshod) look at some personal favorites and news, as well as a couple of interesting cases of certain writers who have multiple new translations on the way.

I’ll start with Katherine E. Young’s translation of Anna Starobinets’s Look at Him, which will be out soon from Three String Books, an imprint at Slavica Publishers. I’m mentioning Look at Him first because the book, a memoir of sorts, made such an impression on me when I read it back in 2018 (previous post). Starobinets is particularly known for writing fictional horror stories but here she tells the true story of her own experiences, many of which are utterly horrifying, when she terminated a pregnancy. For more: Svetlana Satchkova’s interview with Starobinets on Punctured Lines.

There seem to be lots of other translations on the way but please note that I have yet to do much work on this year’s new translation list so may be missing some good and very imminent books. That said, the work I have done is more than enough to know that there’s been some significant slippage in publication dates, likely due to the pandemic. So! Among the other books by women that are in progress, we have three books by Maria Stepanova: the poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, translated by Sasha Dugdale and on the way from Bloodaxe Books in March 2021; In Memory of Memory, fiction translated by Sasha Dugdale and published by New Directions (U.S.) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (U.K.) in February 2021; and The Voice Over, a selection of poems and essays edited by Irina Shevelenko that’s scheduled for publication with Russian Library/Columbia University Press in June 2021.

Another big bright spot is the list at Deep Vellum, whose Will Evans told RusTRANS of a slew of books on the way: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s novel Kidnapped: A Crime Story, translated by Marian Schwartz, and The New Adventures of Helen & Other Magical Tales, translated by Jane Bugaeva; an autobiographical novel by Nataliya Meshchaninova translated by Fiona Bell; and Alisa Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities, translated by *checking on the name*. The RusTRANS blog page also includes a post with a note by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp mentioning that she’s translating one of Yulia Yakovleva’s detective novels; Ruth’s Web site lists the title as Punishment of a Hunter (previous post, where, NB, I used a provisional title); the book is on the way from Pushkin Press in 2021.

For a more historical form of WIT fun, I really love this list of “25 Books by Women in Translation From the Russian Language” on Reading With KT. Yes, I’m very grateful a few of my translations are included and just as glad to see some wonderful translations by colleagues, but I’m especially happy that the list contains two Soviet-era classics that I’ve enjoyed: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna (previous post) is a book I’ve read several times and would recommend to anyone, and Natalya Baranskaya’s A Week Like Any Other, which I’ve only read once (or maybe twice, once in each language?) but ordered up after reading KT’s post. (Languagehat, by the way, was reading A Week (post here) the same week I read the Reading With KT blog post.) For another list of Russian women writers’ books available in translation, here’s A Russian Affair’s (shorter) list, which includes Banine’s Days in the Caucasus, for Pushkin Press, translated from the French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, who also has a note on RusTRANS. (Alas, I just found this book isn’t available in the U.S. until next year.) If I were to add one personal favorite to those two lists, it would be Julia Voznesenskaya’s The Women’s Decameron, which I’ve mentioned a couple times over the years. I read it first in W.B. Linton’s translation, then again in Russian. I bought a copy in Moscow but, another alas here: the box containing that book got lost somewhere between Moscow and Maine. I’d love to think someone swiped the box solely because the Voznesenskaya book was in there.

Finally, on a more personal note, it’s been a nice year for translations of women! Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky, which I translated for Oneworld Publications, was published and made the Read Russia Prize (anglophone!) longlist. It was also the March book club selection on Asymptote.com; I answered some fun interview questions for Asymptote’s Josefina Massot, here. I’m currently translating Maria Galina’s Autochthons (previous post), which never let me go over the years – it’s the perfect puzzling book to translate in this strange time; the translation is for Russian Library/Columbia University Press. In other good news, my translation of Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha made the shortlists of the EBRD Literary Prize and the Read Russia Prize (anglophone again!). Turning to potential future translations: I translated excerpts of two novels written by women: Anna Kozlova’s Rurik (previous post) and Daria Desombre’s The Birdcatcher, which I haven’t posted about but enjoyed very much and then came to love even more when I translated excerpts: not only did it draw on my BFF feelings for War and Peace, it reminded me of studying eighteenth-century Russian literature, particularly sentimentalism. The Birdcatcher is a historical crime novel (with elements of coming-of-age blended in) set in Russia during the War of 1812 and it features a young Russian woman whose family’s rural estate ends up housing French officers. Desombre has also written contemporary detective novels featuring a young woman, Masha Karavai: Shelley Fairweather-Vega translated The Sin Collector for Amazon Crossing. I read another Masha Karavai book early on in the pandemic and found it good light reading that actually keep me reading (I was having a lot of trouble reading at the time), though it made me very wistful about missing Moscow. On another note, a more Petersburg note, it’s a wonderful plus that one of the best books I’ve read this year is Ksenia Buksha’s Churov and Churbanov (previous post); Anne O. Fisher translated a chunk that’s available here. Which leads me to another book written by a woman…

Up Next: Inga Kuznetsova’s Промежуток, which I thoroughly enjoyed, is up next. I’m not sure what will come after that since I’m reading two books, one printed, the other electronic. We’ll see which I finish first!

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual, particularly knowing some of the translators, writers, and publishers mentioned in this post.

2016 Big Book Winners: Yuzefovich Takes Top Jury Prize

Winners of the 2016 Big Book Award were announced this evening in Moscow. The top jury prize went to Leonid Yuzefovich for his Winter Road, which already won this year’s National Bestseller award as well as a translation grant from the Russian Booker. Evgenii Vodolazkin won second prize for his Aviator (previous post) and Ludmila Ulitskaya took third place for her Yakov’s Ladder (previous post). My summary of all this year’s Big Book finalists is on the blog here. All three of these authors have won the top Big Book prize in the past and all three of these books were published by Elena Shubina’s imprint at AST.

Reader’s choice awards, which were announced last week, went to Ulitskaya’s Yakov’s Ladder, Maria Galina’s Autochthons (previous post), and Vodolazkin’s Aviator. The Big Book site notes that only four votes separated the Galina and Vodolazkin books.

An award for contributions to literature went to Boris Kupriyanov, who is, among other things, a co-founder of the Falanster bookstore in Moscow as well as a key figure for two Moscow book fairs/festivals.

Link(s) with commentary:

-Mikhail Edelshtein’s concise pre-ceremony plus/minus view of all the finalists, on Lenta.ru.
-Maya Kucherskaya's summary on Vedomosti. After mentioning that Aleksei Ivanov didn't win anything for his Nenast'e Kucherskaya suggests that a special prize could be given so that all deserving books win something. I'd expected that Ivanov's book would win something (my prediction was that he, not Ulitskaya, would be in the top three and I wasn't far off, Ivanov's point total was very, very close to Ulitskaya's) but special prizes like that would be impractical for an award like Big Book, where the jury is large and members have the option of voting remotely, making that sort of prize logistically difficult. Not to mention contentious! Beyond that, it seems to me that awarding three jury prizes and three reader's choice prizes is already very generous.
-Anna Narinskaya's commentary on Kommersant is far more interesting. I, too, wish books like Sergei Kuznetsov's and Dmitry Danilov's had been Big Book finalists this year: they're both on my shelf but even without having read them yet, I have a strong suspicion that they would have been far better choices than, for (safe) starters, the book about reptiles, which was very, very weak. I couldn't agree more with Narinskaya that books like Danilov's spice up Big Book shortlists: they help readers discover writers and there's a lot to be said for diluting the mainstream. This is a minor point (and I'm probably splitting hairs here) but I can't say that I fit her perception that members of the jury want to read books that reflect on and connect Russian history and the Russian present: my personal bias is just for books that are interesting/compelling and hold together structurally. This time around--and last year, too, with Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes--those happened to be books that involved Russian history. And of course I love Laurus and The Women of Lazarus. And lots of other novels that somehow blend history and the present. But I'm open to anything. Like Danilov's books, which are generally very much in the present... and which I always enjoy so much.
-Two pieces by people I know and thus particularly enjoy reading: Mikhail Vizel on the Год литературы site notes, among other things, that Yuzefovich said that Ivanov should have won. (He also notes that only two points separated the Ulitskaya and Ivanov books, almost nothing, given the totals.) Konstantin Milchin, for TASS, places particular focus on the lack of new names.
-Klarisa Pulson for Novaya Gazeta (here), who says the results were too predictable. Something I agree with... but a jury has to vote on a set list of books.

Disclaimers: The usual. I’m a member of the Big Book’s Literary Academy, its jury, and received all the books from the Big Book and, in some cases, the books’ literary agencies. I have translated books by Vodolazkin—I’m currently working on The Aviator—and excerpts from books by Galina.

Up next: Belated autumn travel report. Belated reading roundup. And books: Sukhbat Aflatuni’s The Ant King, which is very suspenseful and oddly absorbing.

Big Book 2016 Finalists: A Summary

This year’s Big Book Award finalists (previous post with the list is here) fit neatly into three categories: three books I praise highly, three books I enjoyed well enough to finish, and five books I couldn’t finish. Five in the “did not finish” category might sound high, but it’s not unusual for me to finish only about half the books I start; one of the reasons I don’t write more posts about books is that I abandon so many without finishing. Big Book winners will be announced on December 6. Here’s a brief summary of my reading:

Those I praise highly. It probably comes as no surprise that Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator) was my favorite in the bunch (previous post) and is a big favorite for the year, too. The Aviator looks at the nature of time, life, and Soviet history from an angle that I particularly like… but won’t reveal. Translating The Aviator is a treat for the emotions it raises, its simple elegance, and the multiple settings Vodolazkin manages to create. Alexei Ivanov’s Ненастье (Nenast’e) is a treat of an entirely different sort (previous post, which discusses the title) and not just because I’m not translating it: this social novel about Afghan War veterans is suspenseful, dark, and painful, a well-plotted novel about all kinds of relationships. It’s very good and I’ve been pleased to see it garner so much praise among readers. I’m still reading away on Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога, (The Winter Road), one of the most enjoyable works of nonfiction I’ve read in a long time, with Civil War figures and wonderful details about people, places, and politics.

Those I enjoyed well enough to finish. Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part one/part two) (Autochthons) still mystifies me more than a bit since I’m still not exactly sure what happens (previous post) but Galina’s dark-but-cozy combination of tasty meals, cultural history, and a small city setting on the edge of Europe—not to mention humor and the possibility of a character being a sylph—remain vivid in my memory. And I do want to reread it. Using the book light again. Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Hounding) (previous post) also stuck with me, though for opposite reasons: there’s only darkness, nothing cozy, in this story of a journalist who’s being hounded for political reasons. And there are certainly no sylphs. I think I appreciated most the account of bitterness after the 1998 default. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Yakov’s Ladder or Jacob’s Ladder, though I’ll use Ulitskaya’s agent’s title with “Yakov”) (previous) is a family saga that’s told in story-like episodes and includes letters from Ulitskaya’s own family archives. This isn’t my favorite Ulitskaya novel but the familiarity of Ulitskaya’s style and settings made this rather long book read easily, though I often wanted the balance to tip more toward character development than history.

Those I just couldn’t finish. This is the section that gives me no joy whatsoever. Vladimir Dinets’s Песни драконов (Dragon Songs) wasn’t the fun surprise that Nature Girl here dared to hope for. My parents live in Florida—where there seem to be alligators everywhere—and I’ve been to crocodile country in Australia, so I thought I was off to a decent start but somehow I just couldn’t sink my teeth into things like descriptions of alligators “dancing,” and I just wasn’t interested in Dinets’s personal details. Alexander Ilichevsky’s Справа налево (From Right to Left) book of essays is a mishmash that, I’m sorry to say, didn’t grab me at all. Even sadder, though, I thought all the novels in this category lacked narrative drive, a coherent structure, and/or the sense of a good story. I gave Pyotr Aleshkovsky’s Крепость (The Citadel) 106 pages to show me where it was going and, to borrow from what I wrote on Goodreads, was sorry it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a serious social novel about an honest archaeologist or a melodrama with family hysterics. (The big sign I was done: I kept finding excuses to compare recipes in 660 Curries and think about what I needed to buy at the Indian grocery store…) Anna Matveeva’s Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Envy; the Russian title is closer to Vera Stenina’s Enviable Sense but that is, indeed, tough to sort...) was equally painful, though I read nearly 200 pages, hoping something might develop beyond a rather utilitarian tale of one woman’s envy (envy is visualized as a bat here) of her friend. I made it through less (about 50 pages) of Sergei Soloukh’s Рассказы о животных (Stories About Animals), the tale of a man who travels a lot for work. I can’t say I much enjoy reading about driving (perhaps because I don’t especially enjoy driving?) so Stories and I didn’t get off to a good start. Though I’d hoped for a compelling novel about what causes people to lose their humanness, particularly in times of social upheaval, alas, Stories was too muddled to tell me much.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received electronic texts of all these books from the Big Book, for which I serve on the Literary Academy, the award’s jury; I received a couple from the authors’ literary agents, too. Among other things: I’m currently translating The Aviator and have translated excerpts of some of Maria Galina’s other books.

Up Next: I think I’ll write more summary posts: travel, books read in Russian, and books read in English. And a full-length post on Boris Minaev’s Soft Fabric, volume one…

Big Book Three: “The Usual?” and the Unusual in Maria Galina’s Mysterious Autochthons

I have a feeling this may be one of my least informative, least conclusive, and most rambling blog posts ever: I haven’t been kidding when I’ve used the word “mysterious” to describe Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part one/part two)(Autochthons), a book that was shortlisted for this year’s National Bestseller Award and Big Book Award. Pronouncing the English-language title—which looks mysterious, at least to me—turns out to be easy enough, and I’ve now come to think of the word as meaning “the locals,” in the sense of extraordinarily peculiar long-term, indigenous locals. I have no earthly idea how I can possibly describe the novel after presenting something of a plot summary below. At least I’m not alone: Elena Vasileva, for example, writing on Prochtenie.ru, says the characters’ many unreliable accounts of events can cause schizophrenia (or suspicions of such) among readers.

And so, a bare plot summary. Galina sets Autochthons in an unnamed city on the brink of Europe (reader consensus seems to be that it sounds a lot like Lviv), where an unnamed out-of-town visitor claiming to be a freelancer for the theater journal Teatr settles in at a hostel and gets to work, for an unnamed reason that is revealed later, on research into some local—and very obscure—theater history from the 1920s by interviewing a slew of local experts (ha). Among the juicy and dry details, there’s talk of death on the stage, of philosophy, of one of anonymous man’s interlocutors resembling Yuri Lotman, and even of the use Spanish fly. Or maybe not.

Though I wasn’t quite self-diagnosing schizophrenia, all the details and stories that anonymous man uncovers did make me wonder what was happening to my head: Was my memory failing? Was I just confused? Was I reading too much at a time? Too little? Or was I so caught up in the quirky and oddly, charmingly eerie atmosphere and characters of Autochthons that I was zipping through the more serious and, really, more technical material? I suspect the latter but don’t regret, at all, having reading that way. Even little details like the breakfast spot where the waitress always asks “the usual?” («Как всегда?»)—because that establishes both a past and a future—feel at least as important as anonymous man’s formal research. There are clearly patterns here and the city’s legends (urban legends?) are said to include a little sex, fear, violence, and morality, plus a sad ending. Of course everything ends up blending anyway.

Meanwhile, Galina plays with a pile of cultural references, Russian and otherwise. Every person is said to hide the maniac within and when our unnamed hero confronts someone who’s following him in a wax museum, he steps out from behind a Dracula figure. Jack the Ripper’s there, too, and no, of course, this is not the only mention of vampires. Other variations on the human, hmm, condition and form appear, too, perhaps most notably in someone who purports to be a sylph… he asks unnamed man if he’s ever seen Angel Heart, which shows the hazards of pursuing oneself. I haven’t even mentioned world history, meaning the non-theater part, (then again, all the world’s a stage, right?), which also comes up plenty, perhaps most memorably when one character is accused of having been a Nazi collaborator. In any case, Galina twists and blends detective and fantasy genres with local myth plus a figure who comes to a new place as a seemingly clean slate but turns out to be nothing of the sort.

I mentioned in my “up next” sections of previous posts that Autochthons made me think a lot about my own reading habits. For one thing, this is yet another novel complex and puzzling enough that I’d need to reread to understand because I focused so much on one layer in my first reading. I’m not alone here, either: in her Meduza.io review, critic Galina Yuzefovich also mentions the need for a second, slower reading. I always find it difficult to get to know lots of characters at once, particularly when they’re offering up so much unreliable information; Autochthons is certainly appealing enough to read again.

My second “thing” is odder: I most enjoyed reading Autochthons in the dark, with a new book light. (Side note: it’s the Mighty Bright Recharge, which I love and which is worth the extra money for its dimmer, discrete light, very flexible neck, and easy (re)charging.) It didn’t even feel right to read Autochthons using regular lamp light. Somehow, sitting in the dark with a small pool of light from the Recharge illuminating only two pages of the book felt just right for a novel as slyly occult and metaphysical—not to mention slyly humorous—as Autochthons.

August is Women in Translation Month so I also want to note that Maria Galina’s novel Гиви и Шендерович was translated by Amanda Love Darragh, as Iramifications. Amanda won the 2009 Rossica Prize for the translation.

Up Next: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s family saga Jacob’s Ladder, which I’ve almost finished and will move up since Ulitskaya is another woman who’s been translated. Then Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which has been waiting so patiently…

Disclaimers: The usual. I’ve translated excerpts from some of Maria Galina’s novels, including her Mole Crickets, which I enjoyed very much four years ago.

2016 National Bestseller Award Goes to Yuzefovich

Leonid Yuzefovich won the 2016 National Bestseller Award for Зимняя дорога (The Winter Road), a book that describes itself as a “documentary novel.” In my description of the book for my last post, which lists finalists for the 2016 Big Book Award, I wrote, “the cover sums up the details with ‘General A.N. Pepeliaev and anarchist I.Ia. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923.’ I’ve been reading small chunks of The Winter Road each night and thoroughly enjoying Yuzefovich’s absorbing, masterful characterizations of people and a time. He works wonders with archival material.”

Yuzefovich won the very first NatsBest in 2001, too, for his Князь ветра (Prince of the Wind), a fact he noted in his very brief comments after winning today for The Winter Road. Yuzefovich graciously noted that he hopes Mikhail Odnobibl, whose Очередь ([The?] Line) came in second by winning votes from two of the jury’s six members, will receive fame thanks to NatsBest. NatsBest’s slogan is “wake up famous.” Maria Galina’s Автохтоны Autochthons) received one vote. I’m very happy for Yuzefovich, very curious about Odnobibl’s book, and very glad for Galina that her book won a vote, too.

Although commentary on the NatsBest voting and results isn’t yet online, there’s video of the award ceremony available on YouTube here. My post listing the NatsBest finalists is here.

Disclaimers: The usual plus: I’ve translated excerpts of books by Galina as well as NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s entire novel Masha Regina, released by Oneworld Publications last month—just for fun, here’s a Words Without Borders “Watchlist” piece by M. Bartley Seigel recommending it—and was very happy to finally meet Yuzefovich in summery New York last December during Russian Literature Week.

Up Next: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which I loved when I read it and am loving all over again as I translate it; Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I do think I’ll call Faith; Galina’s mysterious Autochthons; and Aleksei Ivanov’s Nasty Weather/Nenast’e, which is pretty absorbing.

2016 Big Book Finalists: Lizok’s Summer Reading Plan

Today the Big Book Award announced eleven finalists for its 2016 season. Here’s the list, in Russian alphabetical order, by author surname, followed by a bit of commentary:

• Pyotr Aleshkovsky’s Крепость (The Citadel), which I bought after reading the beginning of the PDF that Aleshkovsky’s literary agency sent me: archaeology and medieval constructions caught me.
• Evgeny (Eugene) Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which I read recently and loved for its blend of genres, epochs, and themes, some familiar from Laurus and Solovyov and Larionov. I’m translating this book and enjoying it all over again as I see, up-close, how the book works.
• Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part 1) (part 2) (Autochthons, I guess), which is, I can now confirm, a Galina-esque combination of phantasmagoria, magical realism (though hmm?), history, and a regular-guy (anonymous) hero. I finished Autochthons yesterday and still wonder what I read—not, apparently, an unusual reaction—because the book is (usually) cozily disorienting.
• Vladimir Dinets’s Песни драконов (Dragon Songs) is, according to the full title, about love and adventures in the world of crocodiles and other relatives of dinosaurs. Dinets, who lives in the US, writes in Russian and English, and an English version of the book already exists: Publishers Weekly loved it. This could be a fun surprise. For online animal pictures, check Dinets’s blog.
• Aleksei Ivanov’s Ненастье (Nasty Weather, this title is a toponym, too, so I’m going to rethink it) is about an Afghan War veteran who robs an armored car, betraying his comrades. I enjoyed Ivanov’s Geographer (previous post) and this one, which I began last night, is off to a good start.
• Alexander Ilichevsky’s Справа налево (From Right to Left) contains essays.
• Anna Matveeva’s Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Envy; the Russian title is closer to Vera Stenina’s Enviable Sense but that is, indeed, tough to sort...) is a novel about two women and their relationship, which, yes, has strong elements of envy.
• Sergei Soloukh’s Рассказы о животных (Stories About Animals) is, contrary to the title, a novel about human beings, concerning a former academic who’s now working in a business. (brief interview + excerpt)
• Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Jacob’s Ladder) is a family saga set during 1911-2011; I read the beginning after Ulitskaya’s agent sent me the text. This one’s already on the shelf.
• Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Persecution, perhaps?) sounds as indescribable as Galina’s book: I find mentions of youth, irony, cynicism, and this time we live in.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога, (The Winter Road) is described as a “documentary novel”: the cover sums up the details with “General A.N. Pepeliaev and anarchist I.Ia. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923.” I’ve been reading small chunks of The Winter Road each night and thoroughly enjoying Yuzefovich’s absorbing, masterful characterizations of people and a time. He works wonders with archival material.

As for commentary, there were a few books I was especially sorry didn’t make the list… Vasily Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (excerpt) (Crystal in a Transparent Frame), with its ocean theme, and Dmitry Danilov’s Есть вещи поважнее футбола (There Are Things A Little More Important Than Football/Soccer) are at the top of my list. Our cats were rooting for Aleksandr Arkhangelsky’s Правило муравчика. Сказка про бога, котов и собак (excerpt) (The Rule of the Purrer/The Right Cat Rule. A Tale About God, Cats, and Dogs), which I’ll have to read if only to figure out what to do with the title. Based on some good reviews, I was a little surprised Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) didn’t make it, though wonder if the combination of dozens of characters and their stories (including, apparently, sex and vampires, which I wouldn’t think would put people off!) might have, nevertheless, put off the experts. Sasha Okun’s Камов и Каминка (Kamov and Kaminka), which purports to involve art and a detective story, looks so appealing that I may have to read it sooner rather than later. And, finally, as I mentioned in a quick note to Klarisa Pul’son, who wrote this prediction of the finalist list, I was surprised that crocodiles knocked poets out of contention for this year’s award: I was expecting either Zakhar Prilepin’s book on Anatoly Mariengof, Boris Kornilov, and Vladimir Lugovskoi, or Dmitrii Bykov’s book on Vladimir Mayakovsky to make the short list. I thought Klarisa did pretty well by (correctly) predicting six out of eleven books that made the shortlist: even without having read all the books on the long list, I was nearly certain Yuzefovich, Ulitskaya, Ivanov, and Vodolazkin would be finalists; I would have put Aleshkovsky, Avchenko, and Kuznetsov at the top of my “probably” list.

I’ll start posting about finalists soon since I’ve already finished two. All in all, this list looks far more to my taste than last year’s—with some old favorites plus some new names and species—so I’m very much looking forward to reading the finalists as well as the books from the long list that are already on the shelf.

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Big Book’s jury, the Literary Academy, and will vote on finalists later this year. Authors and literary agents have given me electronic copies of several of these books. I am translating one of the finalists.

Up Next: The National Bestseller Award winner. Then three books, all difficult to write about: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which truly does soar, Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I do think I’ll call Faith, and Maria Galina’s Autochthons. I’m now reading Aleksei Ivanov’s book, which I’m thinking of as Nasty Weather for now, because of the sound play.

2016 National Bestseller Award Short List & The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

The National Bestseller Award announced its short list this week. Here’s the list of five finalists—one short of the usual six—with the number of points each was awarded in the first round of voting. Comments on the finalists and the process, written by Vadim Levental, the NatsBest secretary, are online, as are jury members’ reviews and votes.

• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога (excerpt 1) (2) (3) (Winter Road) (12 points). I’ve been looking forward to Winter Road—which describes itself as a documentary novel—ever since it arrived at my house a month or so ago: I feel like I can’t go wrong with the combination of “documentary” and “novel” as well as, of course, Yuzefovich, Civil War figures, and Yakutia, a place I once spent several very wintery days.
• El’dar Sattarov’s Транзит Сайгон-Алматы (literally Transit Saigon-Almaty) (9 points). Sattarov’s apparently a fairly unknown writer from Kazakhstan: the book looks at the history of Vietnam during 1930 through the 1990s, apparently through the story of a partisan.
• Aglaya Toporova’s Украина трех революций (excerpt 1) (2) (3) (very literally Ukraine of Three Revolutions) (8 points). Levental notes Toporova’s “centrist position” and “calm ironic intonation” in describing events in Ukraine in recent years.
• Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part 1) (part 2) (Autochthons, I guess) (7 points). Autochthons sounds like a Galina-esque combination of phantasmagoria, magical realism, history, and a regular-guy hero. I’ll be starting on this one soon, too.
• Mikhail Odnobibl’s Очередь ([The?] Line) (5 points). Even Levental calls this one mysterious; he also describes the book as “Kafkaesque fantasy.” Beyond that, it’s unclear who Odnobibl really is. (An all-too-quick-because-it’s-a-sunny-day search for descriptions popped this piece, which I may take a better look at when the sky’s cloudier.)

Levental also mentions notable authors who missed the short list… picking up many of the same names I did: he praises Alexander Snegirev’s collection of short stories (which Snegirev sent to me and which looks very good), and Anna Matveeva’s novel but said he breathed a sigh of relief that Petr Aleshkovsky and Anatoly Kim missed out. I, too, was surprised that Andrei Astvatsaturov and Dmitrii Danilov received only one point each.

The NatsBest winner will be announced on June 5.

Bonus: A Rambling, Non-Scholarly, and Occasionally Gushy Translated Book Note. I finally (finally!) ordered up a copy of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinki, and containing translations by the editors plus a stellar list of several dozen additional translators, beginning, alphabetically, with Alexandra Berlina and ending with Katherine Young. I bought the anthology for what might be called “business with pleasure” reasons: for one thing, Russian novels often contain lines from well-known Russian poetry, transforming anthologies into reference books for me. For another, I like anthologies with introductory notes about authors and this book’s notes, written by Chandler and Dralyuk, are lively and informative. I also feel a special connection to the book after hearing related translator readings and conference presentations in June 2013 (previous posts).

Though I’ve only puttered with the book a little since I bought it on Tuesday—flipping to random pages and poets as I’m wont to do with collections like this and floating off on happy little tangents—I did take a closer look at one poem, Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Заклятие смехом,” which Christopher Reid’s “after Khlebnikov” interpretation renders as “Laugh Chant.” And which I liked very much because it tied my tongue and made me laugh, just like the original does when I read it aloud. I zaumed in on “Laugh Chant” thanks to Amateur Reader (Tom), who blogs at Wuthering Expectations, and who happens to be on a Russian poetry tear that’s included a recent post about The King of Time: Selected Writingsof the Russian Futurian, a 1985 volume with poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Although the beginning of Schmidt’s version of Khlebnikov’s laughter poem didn’t catch my feel for the poem like Reid’s does, the beautiful incantatory effect of Schmidt’s neologisms, rhyme, and even shifted hyphens (!) in a chunk of Khlebnikov’s play-that's-more-than-a-play, Zangezi, that appears in the Penguin collection bewitched me completely. Zangezi, by the way, was performed in the late 1980s; read about it in The New York Times, here. For a comparison of these same two versions of the laughter poem (as well as mentions of other humorous poems) see Alice E.M. Underwood’s Russian Life article, here.

Disclaimers: The usual as well as warm collegial/professional/personal relations with the editors of the Penguin book and many of the translators therein. I’ve translated excerpts of books by Galina as well as Vadim Levental’s entire novel Masha Regina, which is just out from Oneworld Publications and has even been spotted in the wild at McNally Jackson Books in New York City!

Up Next: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which I just plain loved. Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I may yet call Faith. Translations due out in 2016—send in those entries!

Women in Translation Month: Some Contemporary Russian Reading Ideas

When the blogger known as Biblibio invited me to write a guest post for Women in Translation Month—it’s right now, this August—I was quick to agree to write something for both our blogs. For one thing, I’ve been enjoying Biblibio’s posts for years. For another, I knew it would be easy to put together a list of wonderful female Russian writers; I’ve even translated a book and two stories by a couple of them. Best of all, it’s always fun to make lists like this by remembering good books and the people who write them. Here are some of my favorites.

Margarita Khemlin is one of my very favorite writers, both because I love her books and stories, and because she’s one of the first writers I chose to translate. I started reading Khemlin with her first book, the story collection The Living Line, and moved on to her novels—Klotsvog, Krainii (The Endman), and The Investigator—reading each as soon as I could after it was published. Margarita’s stories and novels are generally about life in eastern Ukraine, and I particularly love the language she uses to tell, with quiet but dark humor and occasional dialogue in surzhik, a combination of Ukrainian and Russian, about Jewish heritage and the never-ending effects of World War 2. I’ve published translations of two of Margarita’s stories from The Living Line: “Basya Solomonovna’s Third World War” appeared in Two Lines (the “Counterfeits” edition, 2011) and was reprinted in the Read Russia! anthology, too (PDF download); “Shady Business” came out in issue 17 of Subtropics earlier this year. “Shady Business” took me forever: I knew the words (and got great help from Misha Klimov, a local colleague, on the ones I didn’t, those being the surzhik) but wanted to be sure I was capturing the emotions of elderly characters who’d survived the war. I still can’t believe how much feeling and history Margarita can pack into so few, seemingly simple, words. I’m sure that’s why I love her writing so much.

Marina Stepnova’s novel The Women of Lazarus also looks at history, through an unconventional family saga that begins just after the Russian Revolution and continues to the present, focusing on various women in the life of Lazar Lindt, the Lazarus in the title. I loved the novel’s combination of history, various forms of poshlost’, postmodernism, and cultural commentary when I read it but didn’t truly appreciate how much Stepnova had achieved until I was working on a late draft of my translation. (The many, many levels of new-found appreciation I find through translation are a big reason I love translating so much.) Stepnova, a literary magpie, fills her novel with colorful and changeable language, historical perspectives and figures (Beria has a cameo), Soviet science, references to pre-revolutionary cookery, and ballet. Among other things. But everything comes together, creating an almost ridiculously readable and comprehensive novel about the meaning of family and the meaning of country and culture and heritage. Among other things… it’s a very rewarding book that can be read on many levels.

Alisa Ganieva won notice by winning the Debut Prize for the novella Salam, Dalgat!, which she wrote under the male pseudonym Gulla Khirachev because of taboos against a woman writing about a world that is “absolutely male.” I loved Salam, Dalgat! for its story of a day in the life of a man searching Makhachkala, Dagestan, for a relative. As I wrote earlier, “With its mixture of humor, tradition (wife stealing even gets a mention, though a character says that’s a Chechen habit), and a sense of alarm about the future, Salam, Dalgat! felt unusually energetic and organic, all as poor Dalgat, seeking but never quite managing to find, trots along, a perfectly agreeable, generally patient, nearly blank slate of a character, the ideal figure for a reader like me, who’s never been to Makhachkala, to follow.” Translations of Ganieva’s writing are available and on the way: Nicholas Allen’s translation of Salam, Dalgat! appears in the anthology Squaring the Circle (Glas, 2011), Marian Schwartz’s translation of the story “Shaitans” is in the Read Russia! anthology (PDF download), and Carol Apollonio’s translation of The Russian Wall (Праздничная гора) will be published next summer by Deep Vellum.

Since I’ve been so chatty about the first three writers, I’ll keep things shorter and limit myself to brief notes on four more writers I’ve especially enjoyed reading. Each has a story in the same Read Russia! anthology I mentioned above and each has at least one novel already out in English translation… I’ve read quite a few books and stories by Ludmila Ulitskaya and think my favorite is probably Sincerely Yours, Shurik, which has never been translated into English. Of those that exist in English, I particularly enjoyed the polyphonic Daniel Stein, Interpreter, (which Arch Tate translated for The Overlook Press) about a Polish Jew who works for a Nazi officer and dies a Carmelite monk in Israel. The Big Green Tent is on the way, too, in Bela Shayevich’s translation… And then there’s Olga Slavnikova, whose 2017—beautifully stuffed with gems, metaphors, and plot lines—won the Russian Booker. I particularly enjoyed the expedition scenes and carnivalistic episodes; Marian Schwartz translated 2017 for The Overlook Press… Maria Galina’s Mole Crickets appealed to me because of the voice Galina creates for her narrator, a man who rewrites books (e.g. a classic by Joseph Conrad) by incorporating clients into the plot lines. Though Mole Crickets hasn’t been translated, Amanda Love Darragh won the Rossica Prize for translating Galina’s Гиви и Шендерович, as Iramifications, published in 2008 by Glas… Finally, there’s Anna Starobinets, whose Sanctuary 3/9 kept me up late at night: the novel’s combination of folk tale motifs, suspense, and creepiness is perfect. Sanctuary hasn’t been translated into English but three other Starobinets books have: An Awkward Age, translated by Hugh Aplin for Hesperus; The Living, translated by James Rann for Hesperus; and The Icarus Gland, coming this fall from James Rann and Skyscraper Publications.

Happy reading! And a big, huge thanks to Biblibio for the invitation... and all this month’s posts about books written by women.

Disclaimers: I’ve translated work by some of the writers mentioned in this post and met all of them, if only briefly. I work on occasional projects for Read Russia and have translated a book for Glas: appropriately enough, it’s Russian Drama: Four Young Female Voices, with four very diverse plays by Yaroslava Pulinovich, Ksenia Stepanycheva, Ekaterina Vasilyeva, and Olga Rimsha.

Up Next: Evgenii Chizhov’s Перевод с подстрочника (literally Translation from a Literal Translation), which I’ve finally finished. And which I already miss. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even slowing down a little in the last sections because I didn’t want it to end. Several books read in English, including a wonderful Dovlatov translation.

People Who Need People: Maria Galina’s Mole Crickets

Maria Galina’s Медведки (Mole Crickets) is not, alas, a novel about entomology, though there are superficial metaphorical similarities between the nocturnal, burrowing mole cricket and the novel’s narrator, a man who calls himself an editor and lives alone in a rented dacha somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea. Galina incorporates plenty of humor as she patches together slivers of various genres—particularly fantasy and picaresque—to examine identity and family, storytelling and mythmaking, truth and invention.

Richard Lydekker's life history of the mole cricket from
The Royal Natural History, 1879. (via Wikipedia)

It’s narrative voice rather than plot or structure that gives Mole Crickets its appeal and cohesion. Our loner narrator, whose last name is Blinkin but goes by the penname Trigorin—Chekhov alert!—writes books for clients, creating pastiches by plopping the clients into storylines from existing works. (I love that he never gives them cell phones...) At the start of Mole Crickets, we watch him transform Joseph Conrad as he fills a client’s order, changing the name of a sea and concluding that Conrad was a pretty good writer.

Blinkin’s somewhat reclusive life is disturbed early in the book when a new client, Smetankin, who grew up in an orphanage, appears and asks Blinkin to create a family history for him. Smetankin’s request is intrusive for Blinkin on many levels. Beyond insisting on fast service that Blinkin would prefer to refuse, Smetankin worsens Blinkin’s relationship with his widower father: Dad thinks Smetankin would be a better son than his editor son, whom he considers a slacker. Smetankin even renovates Dad’s apartment. And then there’s Rogneda, a gothish young woman who arrives at Blinkin’s dacha, claiming to be Smetankin’s Siberian daughter and asking for lodging until Smetankin has a party, a reunion of sorts for his invented (or not?) family. We also meet Finke, Blinkin’s dacha neighbor, an archaeologist.

Mole Crickets is a pleasure to read because Galina’s Blinkin is so engagingly human as he tells all these stories, saying he tires of people, has three nipples like his father, and loves making flea market visits to scout for china. Blinkin’s voice is strong enough that I enjoyed the book to the end even when the interweaving of the book’s subplots didn’t quite work for me. I think part of my (slight) disappointment is that Mole Crickets veered away from expectations Galina established at the start of the book: I enjoyed watching Blinkin size up his client and rewrite Conrad so was looking forward to observing more interactions with clients, books, and various types of fictions.

Blinkin’s invention of a family history for Smetankin worked well for me, though the arrival of Rogneda did not: Rogneda tipped the quirk-o-meter enough that I had trouble suspending disbelief. Rogneda felt a little too modishly clichéd with her attitude and dark clothes, plus I just couldn’t buy that Blinkin would let her stay in his personal (albeit rented) space. Rogneda also contributes to the novel’s mystical and mythical elements, most of which felt tacked on to me. Finke, with his study of Achilles, Hecate, and sacrifices, is part of this angle, too, and Galina even includes a scholarly paper by Finke as an appendix to the novel.

Still, my misgivings feel pretty picky given the sheer entertainment value of Mole Crickets: Galina and Blinkin won me over with their observations about people who need people… as well as family histories that put all those people in context.

Four things:

• Mole Crickets is a finalist for the 2012 Big Book award. 
• Mole Crickets was named book of the year (written by a Russian author) on the site Fantlab. 
• Медведки is available online on Журнальный зал (beginning) (end) and Bookmate (here). 
• Amanda Love Darragh won the Rossica Prize for her translation of Galina’s Гиви и Шендерович, known in English as Iramifications and available from Glas. 

Up Next: Dmitrii Danilov’s Чёрный и зелёный (Black and Green), a novella about a tea salesman that overshadowed Mole Crickets because I loved it so much. Then short stories galore and Dmitrii Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ (The Forty Years of Chanchzhoeh), which I was surprised to find on my local Russian grocery store’s tiny shelf of used books along with Viktor Pelevin’s Чапаев и пустотa, known in English as Buddha’s Little Finger. A nice consolation purchase since they’d sold out of my beloved halva in chocolate.

Disclosure: The usual. I received a copy of Mole Crickets from Read Russia! Thank you!

Amanda Love Darragh Wins Rossica Prize

Russian news sites, including lenta.ru and openspace.ru, report that Amanda Love Darragh won the 2009 Rossica Prize for Iramifications, her translation of Maria Galina’s novel Гиви и Шендерович. 

I listed the six other Rossica finalists in this previous post. Information about each finalist book is available on the Academia Rossica site. The Rossica Prize carries a monetary award of £5,000, which is split between translator and publisher.

P.S. Here's an article, with slide show, from the Academia Rossica site: link

Iramifications on Amazon