Russian Literature Awards News: Rossica Prize Awarded and New Direction for Compass Award

The Rossica Prize was awarded last week to Angela Livingstone for her translation of a collection of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, published by Angel Classics: Phaedra; with New Year’s Letter and Other Long Poems. I’ll add a link with further information when Academia Rossica has posted full information on their Web site. (I learned of the results on Facebook, from Rossica finalist Peter Daniels, translator of Selected Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich, also on the shortlist and also published by Angel Classics.) I blogged, briefly, about this year’s Rossica Prize shortlist here.

Academia Rossica’s announcement of the award.

Monday Morning Update: Here’s a Russian-language article from RIA Novosti with full Rossica Prize information. This piece notes that Laura Thomas won the Rossica Young Translators Award; she translated an excerpt from Sergei Shargunov’s 1993. And here’s an English-language piece from Russian Mind that quotes from judges’ comments about Angela Livingstone’s translation of Tsvetaeva.

In other award news, Cardinal Points announced that writer and translator Alexander Veytsman is the new director for the Compass Translation Award. This is as good a time as any to mention that this year’s Compass Award will be accepting entries until July 31, 2014: this year’s poet is Arseny Tarkovsky. The choice of Tarkovksy is great: I can only second Compass’s hope that the contest will help more readers discover Tarkovsky and his poems. I discovered Tarkovsky because he’s buried in the same cemetery as Boris Pasternak in Peredelkino, chanced upon a nice, compact three-volume set of his poetry soon thereafter, and then began bringing him flowers, too, on my annual trips for poetry readings at Pasternak’s dacha on the anniversary of his death.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Aleksei Motorov’s amiable Male Nurse Paravozov’s Young Years and then something completely, totally, and absolutely different: Yuri Mamleyev’s Шатуны, which will be known in Marian Schwartz’s translation for Haute Culture Books as The Sublimes. No matter what the title, this is one of the most peculiar (I lack a better word at the time being…) books I’ve read in a long time.

Image credit: Tarkovsky’s grave in Peredelkino, A. Savin, Creative Commons.