Yet More Awards: Yasnaya Polyana and Andrei Bely

I always seem to forget how many awards are awarded each autumn! I’m especially slow on the uptake this year… Beyond lots of translating, there’s been lots of book and bookshelf moving around here, though I have to admit that moving books is an oddly pleasant distraction, at least in small doses.

This year’s Yasnaya Polyana “XXI Century” award went to Arsen Titov for Тень Бехистунга (Behistun’s Shadow? The Shadow of Behistun?), a big, old-fashioned historical novel, apparently a trilogy, set during World War I. The “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” award went to Roman Senchin for Чего вы хотите? (I’ll go with Whaddya Want?), which sounds like a very personal book—one of the three pieces is written from his daughter’s perspective—about growing up in contemporary Russia. The “Contemporary Classic” award went to Boris Yekimov for his 1999 long story/novella Pinochet. For more (in Russian) on this year’s winners: Lenta, ReadRate, and Prosto biblioblog.

Happy birthday (new style) to Andrei Bely!

The Andrei Bely Prize winners pique my interest more than this year’s Yasnaya Polyana winners. Two poets won this year. The poet I’m familiar with is Kirill Medvedev, who was recognized for Поход на мэрию, which I’ll call Attack on City Hall since that’s what the title poem is called in It’s No Good (Всё плохо), a book translated by the team of Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich. I wrote a bit about It’s No Good in this 2013 post; I’ve read more chunks of the book since then and enjoyed them, too. This year’s other poetry winner is Irina Shostakovskaya, for 2013-2014: the last year book.

The 2014 Bely Prize prose winner is Aleksei Tsvetkov, for Король утопленников (King of the Drowned). This book features prose texts arranged by size: the first takes up less than half a page, the last is around 80 pages long. Though the ordering of the stories seems gimmicky, the book looks rather appealing. King of the Drowned has already made the long list for the NOS(E) award; it was not written by the poet named Aleksei Tsvetkov. The Bely site includes names of winners in other award categories, including humanitarian research, translation, and criticism. The Bely shortlist is also available here; I somehow missed it when it was announced in September. The only shortlisted book I’ve read is a prose finalist: Serhij Zhadan’s absorbing Voroshilovgrad, which I read in Zaven Babloyan’s translation from the original Ukrainian.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Books galore… Evgeny Vodolazkin’s first novel, Solovyov and Larionov, Marina Stepnova’s Italian Lessons, and Viktor Remizov’s Ashes and Dust. Plus a small pile of books I’ve been reading in English.

Andrei Bely Prize Award Winners & Some Links

I’m about a week late and a ruble short on this one but want to mention winners of the Andrei Bely prize. Nikolai Baitov won the prose award for Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak or maybe Think Before You Speak), a collection of short stories. The poetry award went to Andrei Poliakov’s Китайский десант (Parenthetical information edited: please see comments... I’ll call this Chinese Landing Force, though an online bookstore calls it Chinese Descent. This title is (of course!) complicated since десант is usually a military landing or the troops who make them. I’m equally uninformed about these terms in English and Russian so suggestions are welcome.). Information on other Bely awards is available here. Just one of my rubles would endow this prize: that’s the value of the entire fund.

Bonus! Baitov is also a poet; some of his poems are available online in Jim Kates’s translations (Cardinal Points) (Jacket).

I learned about another award winner just before posting: John Woodsworth and Arkadi Klioutchanski won the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work for their translation of Sofia Tolstaya’s My Life, published by the University of Ottawa Press. Woodsworth and Klioutchanski are both affiliated with the University of Ottawa. (press release) Thanks to the American Literary Translators Association for mentioning the award on Facebook.

I’ve run across a wealth of articles about Russian literature lately. Here are links to a few:

I always enjoy reading Russian Dinosaur’s blog but the two most recent posts were particularly engaging: the Dinosaur’s thoughts about The Collaborators, John Hodge’s new play about Mikhail Bulgakov, and a wonderful piece on a talk that Oliver Ready gave about translation. Oliver offered examples from Crime and Punishment, which he is translating, and the Dinosaur included one of the sentences, in the original and four translations. The blog called XIX век then followed with two related posts (here) and (here). XIX век is, by the way, written in English.

Last week Stephen Dodson, perhaps better known as Languagehat, opened the “A Year in Reading” series for The Millions with a post about Life and Fate. Life and Fate received more attention this week, through a review by Adam Kirsch on The New Republic’s site; the piece first appeared in Tablet. Also: The Quarterly Conversation published Malcolm Forbes’s essay about Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (in David McDuff’s translation); I still need to print this piece out so I can read it properly. (I also need to push Petersburg forward on my bookshelf… I’ve been intending to reread it for years.) Finally, Scott Esposito’s review of Victor Pelevin’s The Hall of Singing Caryatids, translated by Andrew Bromfield and recently released by New Directions, appeared on The National’s site.

Up Next: Trip notes about the American Literary Translators Association conference in Kansas City and Vsevolod Benigsen’s Раяд (Rayad), a novel about nationalism that feels a little formulaic... A year-end post with 2011 favorites is also on the schedule, and I’m planning to compile a list of new and upcoming translations. The latter will likely coincide with a presentation I’ll be giving at the Scarborough Public Library in late January—I’m excited to talk about some of the new titles at my town library!

It’s been an extraordinarily hectic fall—in lots of very, very good ways—but things seem to be settling back into a real routine, which means I’m getting back to my usual reading and writing habits. Thank goodness!

Disclosures: The usual.

Booker of the Decade & Bely 2011 Short Lists

Today was a big day for Russian book award short lists… Here are two quick bleary-eyed, late-evening lists [with a few next-morning edits]:

First, the Russian Booker of the Decade, for which a huge panel of past judges chose five books out of the 60 that were shortlisted over the past 10 years. The winner will be announced on December 1. The five finalists, in Russian alphabetical order, are:

• Oleg Pavlov – Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days/Commemoration in Karaganda). This is the third book in the trilogy that begins with Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale), which I wrote about here. Pavlov’s novel is the only book on the list that has won a Booker.
• Zakhar Prilepin – Санькя (San’kya), which I wrote about here. I have a strong preference for Prilepin’s Грех, (Sin) (previous post), which won the SuperNatsBest earlier this year, but San’kya has often been cited for its political significance.
• Roman Senchin – Елтышевы (1) (2) (The Yeltyshevs) (previous post), one of my favorite books of recent years [one I’d like to translate], a novel that was short-listed for everything but hasn’t won an award.
• Liudmila Ulitskaya – Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) won the Big Book award a few years ago. I enjoyed the book very much when I read it several years ago (previous post). Daniel Stein came out in translation, from Overlook Press, earlier this year.
• Aleksandr Chudakov – Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps), a complete mystery to me. Words Without Borders describes the book as a “memoiristic novel” and says Chudakov wrote “widely admired memoirs of such leading Russian literary scholars as Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Vinogradov, and Lidia Ginzburg,” plus five books and a couple hundred articles.

Now for the Andrei Bely prize short list, for which winners will be announced on December 2… fortunately there is overlap with the NOSE long list, so I can copy and paste a few of these.

• Nikolai Baitov – Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.
• Igor Golubentsev – Точка Цзе (Not sure… The Tsze Spot, The Tsze Point, Sharpening Tsze? [see first comment, from languagehat]), apparently a collection of very short stories.
• Vladimir Mikhailov – Русский садизм (Russian Sadism). ?
• Aleksandr Markin –Дневник. 2006-2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger, who has interests in German literature and European architecture.
• Denis Osokin – Овсянки (Yellowhammers), a novella that has already been made into a film known in English as Silent Souls.
• Pavel Pepperstein – Пражская ночь (Prague Night). I know more (but still not much!) about Pepperstein as a conceptualist artist and founder of “Inspection ‘Medical Hermeneutics’” than as a writer. A friend did mention enjoying Prague Night, though.
• Мария Рыбакова -- Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt

The Andrei Bely award also recognizes other types of writing, including poetry and humanitarian research. I’m especially excited about the poetry category this time – the nominees are Polina Barskova, Alla Gorbunova, Vladimir Ermolaev, Vasilii Lomakin, Andrei Poliakov, Aleksei Porvin, and Ilya Rissenberg – because I met Polina Barskova at a wonderful poetry translation conference here in Maine last weekend. The title poem from her nominated collection, Сообщения Ариэля (Ariel’s Message), is available in translation here on Cardinal Points, and OpenSpace.ru has a video of Polina reading another poem (“Соучастие” (scroll down for text)). Even if you don’t understand Russian, it’s worth clicking through just to hear Polina’s voice and watch her expressions.

P.S. November 9, 2011: Melville House has a nice post on Polina Barskova that mentions her collections that have been translated into English plus some colorful background on the Bely Prize.

Up next: Iurii Buida’s Синяя кровь (Blue Blood).

Disclosures: The usual. I know Overlook Press from meetings in and around BookExpo America. And I still hope someone will decide they want to publish The Yeltyshevs!