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.

Anna Starobinets’s Look at Him

Perhaps the easiest thing to write about Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Look at Him) is that it blends several genres. The cover says “100% .doc” and the book is, indeed nonfiction—albeit a combination of memoir, medical history, and journalism, so not thoroughly .doc, at least to my mind—but what makes the book so compelling and human is that Starobinets puts her fiction-writing background to good use, pacing her book to develop a story arc and suspense. I could only read a little bit at a time because a personal story about late-term abortion is so intensely emotional. Even so, I had a hard time putting the book down at night.

Starobinets begins Look at Him at a routine ultrasound exam, to check her baby’s progress. She learns that her baby is a boy but she also learns he may have polycystic kidney disease. The medical side of her baby’s story is so complex, from many angles, including genetics, prenatal testing, and possible outcomes, that I won’t elaborate on that much. What’s most crucial to the book’s narrative arc is that Starobinets decides to terminate her pregnancy because doctors advise her that if she carries her son to term he will have a minimal chance of surviving.

Starobinets has been called a Russian Stephen King but learning about the realities of her child’s condition (which involves waiting and learning about various potential outcomes) and medical procedures for late-term abortion (some of which she quotes from online forums) in Look at Him mean she doesn’t need to embellish the truth to develop the afore-mentioned suspense. There’s another layer to the book, though, that creates at least as much tension: how the Russian medical system treats her much of the time. Without asking her permission, one specialist brings in medical students to observe her transvaginal ultrasound. Finding her way through the medical system is demeaning. She receives little empathy from many practitioners, though there are exceptions. And forgetting to wear foot covers can be problematic; she storms a clinic bathroom when she’s told she can’t go in without them. Her husband isn’t allowed in a clinic for her appointment, though she needs his moral support. And then there are the stories and admonitions she reads online.

Starobinets ends up going to Berlin after a friend finds a clinic for her. Many aspects of her treatment, both medical and human, are different there. Her husband is welcome at the clinic (even to spend the night) and she’s told “There is no reason why you should be in pain.” One of her biggest fears now is seeing her child. (This is where the book’s title comes from.) Starobinets and her husband are told at the clinic that parents usually look at their children after they’ve been born this way, meaning already dead; many even spend a day with them. Some of the most affecting scenes in the book describe Starobinets and her husband seeing their son after his birth, receiving an envelope with a photo and hand- and footprints, and visiting their baby’s grave later, when they return to Berlin for Starobinets’s husband, Alexander Garros, to have treatment for esophageal cancer. (Part of what made Look at Him so emotional is that I knew Garros died in 2017.) Starobinets notes that many Russian marriages break up after late-term terminations of pregnancy and she suspects that’s largely because husbands aren’t allowed into clinics, hospitals, or births. Or to look at their babies after the procedure and truly be able to share their wives’ grief. Garros helps Starobinets after their return home, too, when she has panic attacks And he’s with her when she gave birth to a healthy son in Latvia a couple of years later.

There’s lots more to Look at Him—I haven’t even touched on the role of Starobinets’s and Garros’s daughter in the family’s story—including a hundred pages of appendices covering interviews with doctors and patients plus comparative statistics on terminations of pregnancies in Germany and Russia. After reading some appendices and skimming others, I can see that they make Look at Him a sort of memoir that offers substantial background for other families faced with tough decisions based on prenatal exams and/or with similar emotions after the loss of a child with a congenital condition. More than that, it’s a book about life and death, basic human dignity, and treatment under various medical systems. (Unfortunately, dignity isn’t guaranteed anywhere, something I’ve certainly seen both from working as a medical interpreter for several years and from being a consumer of health care in the U.S., where the system gives ample opportunities to see absurd bureaucracy, burdensome pricing despite insurance, and bedside manner that can be indifferent, opinionatedly pushy, or inept at basic things like blood draws.) There’s been controversy about Look at Him, which is a finalist for the 2018 National Bestseller Award, but I commend Starobinets, as both a mother and a writer, for being able to sort through her emotions and knowledge, discuss her decisions (which not every reader will agree with), and write a book that tells so many real-life stories about what happened both during and after her pregnancy. Yes, it’s a work that’s both journalistic and personal rather than poetic or lovely, and some might see it as TMI, but Look at Me feels honest, like a genuine attempt to offer information to other families, no matter what they may ultimately decide when faced with similar situations that offer no ideal resolutions.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up next: I’m slowly wending my way through a heavy “write about” shelf: the lovely short story cycle I’ve mentioned earlier, Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m already waiting for the sequel!), Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk in Nora Seligman Favorov’s translation, and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And more…

The 2018 National Bestseller Award Shortlist

The National Bestseller Award announced its five-book shortlist last week, reviving an annual burning question: Who will wake up famous this year? If shortlist voting is any indication, it’ll be Aleksei Sal’nikov for his Petrovs novel, the one with the title I’m not quite sure how to translate… Not that The Petrovs are alone: as always, there are other titles that could be interpreted in various ways, depending on how the books turn. Based on NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s commentary about the shortlist, many of the shortlist candidate books provoked lively discussion about literature and life. (See below!) The NatsBest winner will be announced on May 26.

For now, here’s the shortlist:

• Aleksei Sal’nikov’s Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него (I called it The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu when it won the literary critic panel’s NOS(E) award earlier this year.) (12 points). I was a little underwhelmed by The Petrovs when I read a big chunk of it as part of last year’s Big Book reading, but I want very much to try it again now that it’s out in book form—it didn’t feel like a novel to read electronically.
• Vasilii Aksyonov’s Была бы дочь Анастасия (Perhaps If There Were a Daughter Anastasia? This title feels like it could go in various ways, too, depending…) (6 points). About nature in Siberia.
• Maria Labych’s Сука (Bitch) (6 points). A novel about a woman fighting on the frontlines in Donbass.
• Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Look at Him, maybe?) (6 points). About late-term abortion. This book is on the shelf.
• Dmitrii Petrovskii’s Дорогая, я дома (I’m Home, Dear or Honey, I’m Home, depending on the tone.) (5 points). Hmm, a novel that takes place from the 1940s through the 2020s and is described as looking at the past, present, and future of European civilization.

Disclaimers: The usual. And I translated NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina.

Up Next: It’s Award Season (Phase I) and the Big Book longlist will be announced on April 24. Plus many books: the lovely short story cycle I’ve mentioned, Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m already waiting for the sequel!), Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk in Nora Seligman Favorov’s translation, and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And more to come... It’s a busy spring for translations, which is perfect as I continue wending my way through a lot of Tolstoy’s Peace and just a little of his War.

The 2017 Big Book Longlist: Another Better-Late-Than-Never Production

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, more than once: I love literary award longlists. And I particularly love comparing literary awards longlists because it seems there are lots of good books that make longlists but not shortlists…

Anyway. This year’s Big Book longlist has 34 titles, of which two are in manuscript form, hence unpublished at the time they were submitted. (I always find this a bit mysterious…) As for methodology: I’ll first list eight books I’m already interested in then move on to a few titles by unfamiliar authors.

• Andrei Volos’s Должник (The Debtor) is book three of a tetralogy. I’ve never read Volos, despite numerous recommendations over the years… Maybe the tetralogy is the place to start.
• Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Тайный год (The Secret Year, though I suspect this is “secret” with a good dose of mysteriousness…) is set during the time of Ivan the Terrible.
• Dmitri Danilov’s Сидеть и смотреть (Sit and Look/Watch), which I read part of—and enjoyed but wanted to read in print form—when it first came out in journal form is very Danilov. (Much of it was written on a phone.)
• Shamil Idiatullin’s Город Брежнев (Brezhnev City, at least sort of: Naberezhnye Chelny was called “Brezhnev” during 1982-1988) is a brick of a book (700 pages) about the 1980s. Recommended highly by critic Galina Yuzefovich.
• Anna Kozlova’s F20 is apparently a novel about a teenager with schizophrenia. F20 is already on the 2017 NatsBest shortlist; it won the most points in the first round.
• Dmitry Novikov’s Голомяное пламя (hmm, the first word is an adjectival form of “голомя,” a Pomor word that means open sea or distant sea… so maybe something like Flame Out at Sea or Flame Over the Open Sea…), which I’ve seen recommended several times already this year, is a book I have a special interest in because Novikov is from Petrozavodsk and writes about the Russian north.
• Vladimir Sorokin’s Манарага (Manaraga) apparently involves cooking food over fires of burning books. Yuzefovich recommended this title, too. Hmm, I didn’t know Manaraga’s a mountain…
• Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Maybe Look at Him? I’m not sure…) is about motherhood and the loss of a child before birth.

Though there are plenty of books by authors I’ve already read—Yuri Buida, Viktor Pelevin, Andrei Rubanov (The Patriot is already a NatsBest shortlister), Dina Rubina, and Aleksei Slapovskii—I’ll pick books by three authors I’d never heard of:

• Olga Breininger’s В Советском Союзе не было аддерола (There Was No Adderal in the Soviet Union) certainly has a memorable title. Breininger’s originally from Kazakhstan but lives in Boston. The novel starts off mentioning a conference of Slavists… the book was longlisted for the Debut Prize in 2015. Confession: I’ve liked academic conference novels since reading David Lodge during my grad school years. (I wonder if this is connected to the fact that I dropped out of grad school?)
• Viktoria Lebedeva’s Без труб и барабанов (Without Trumpets and Drums) sounds like it’s a family history/saga, set from the middle of the twentieth century until the present.
• Andrei Tavrov’s Клуб Элвиса Пресли (The Elvis Presley Club) does not seem to take place near Graceland. Darn. But it looks like there’s Sochi.

Disclaimers: The usual; I’m a member of the Big Book jury, also known as the Literary Academy. The shortlist will be along in late May.

Up next: The Afanasy Mamedov novella set in Baku that I mentioned in previous posts. And some reading in English, including Charlotte Hobson’s The Vanishing Futurist, which is perfect reading for (and about) a hectic time; it pairs nicely with James Womack’s translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky in “Vladimir Mayakovsky” & Other Poems, which arrived last week. I’ll be reading other translations in preparation a roundtable during Russian Literature Week in early May, hosted by Read Russia in New York.

Happy New Year! & 2015 Highlights

It’s a mystery to me how 2015 managed to slip by so quickly, but here I am, yet again, with holiday greetings. Happy new year! С Новым годом! For at least the third year in a row, the reading situation has been quality over quantity with lots of abandonments but also a fair number of books I’ve enjoyed. It’s been another busy year of translation, too. Here are a few highlights in categories that I’ve (as always!) fashioned to fit what I enjoyed most:

Favorite debut novel. Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (previous post) was one of my favorite books of the year and, as I’ve noted before, my enjoyment of the book only grew when I translated excerpts for Elkost, Yakhina’s literary agency. I still don’t quite understand how Yakhina makes a book about the exile of a kulak woman into such a lovely, affecting novel, but I’m going to just chalk that up to the magic of fiction. As I’ve said before, Zuleikha certainly deserves the praise and awards—the Yasnaya Polyana and Big Book—that it has won. It was a pleasure to rank Zuleikha highest on my Big Book ballot in my first year as a voting jury member.

Favorite book by a writer I’d already read. Marina Stepnova’s Italian Lessons (Безбожный переулок in Russian) (previous post), which I’m happy to say I’ll start translating in March for World Editions, publisher of my translation of Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus, released this September. (You can read about Stepnova and The Women of Lazarus here, in a comprehensive piece by Phoebe Taplin.) Anyway! Italian Lessons tells of a love triangle but is, more than anything, put broadly, hmm (particularly since I might change my mind after translating), a novel about the difficulties of contemporary Russian life. With background, food, travel, and lots of literary references I can’t wait to sort through.

Favorite children’s book. I don’t read many children’s books but I did read two this year… and I enjoyed Anna Starobinets’s Catlantis (previous post) so much that I had to mention it, particularly since Pushkin Press recently published Jane Bugaeva’s English translation. I read the Russian but—knowing Jane, her love for cats, and her love for linguistic fun—I’m certain the translation is just as much fun as the original. If you’re looking for a chapter book about a love-struck, time-traveling cat, search no further than Catlantis!

Favorite book I haven’t finished. Valerii Zalotukha’s The Candle (Свечка), my second-place Big Book book. Weighing in at about 1,850 pages, I admit I still haven’t finished the book, though with its combination of the Moscow nineties, references to War and Peace, and themes of criminal activity and sociocultural wreckage, I might love to be stuck in The Candle for years. I’ve read at least one novel’s worth already, in binges and in small bits, and love how easy it is to enjoy The Candle however I read. A post will be coming whenever.

Signing books at The Strand!

Favorite travel. This is tough because I always enjoy the American Literary Translators Association annual conference… but I think Russian Literature Week, which brought me to New York earlier this month, had that beat. Not only did I love being part of a Bridge Series event with Eugene Vodolazkin, about Лавр/Laurus, at BookCourt in Brooklyn, and moderated by Sal Robinson, but it was fun moderating a roundtable at the Brooklyn Public Library with Vodolazkin, Vladimir Sharov, and Dmitry Petrov, too. Of course it was great to just have a chance to spend time in balmy New York (60 degrees F!) with them, Leonid Yuzefovich, translators Marian Schwartz and Oliver Ready, and many, many other translators, writers, readers, publishers, and other colleagues from New York, Moscow, and beyond. My memories of the week are so horribly skewed from being a part of two events—even when I attended events I wasn’t involved in, I was thinking about how anything Sharov and Vodolazkin said might apply to our roundtable—that I’m thoroughly incapable of writing a trip report, so I’ll just say here that it was all great fun. And that sitting under a warm December sun in the middle of Broadway or walking around Central Park talking about Russian books is pretty nice.

Happiest mood. What seems to stick most about 2015 is how good the year was to me and my books. Three of my translations were released—Vladislav Otroshenko’s Addendum to a Photo Album, Stepnova’s Women of Lazarus, and Vodolazkin’s Laurus—and all have had nice reviews on reader blogs, in publications like The TLS, and even in the wonderfully hybrid New Yorker Page-Turner blog, where Ken Kalfus’s “Holy Foolery,” about Laurus, helped the book find many, many readers. And that, I have to say, is one of the reasons I love this translation thing so much to begin with: beyond the fun of translation itself and the very humbling honor of becoming a writer’s English-language voice, I love being able to help books reach new readers. And that, I think is the perfect place to end 2015, though only blog-wise since there is still a little food, wine, and reading to go. And I do want to say how much I’m looking forward to next year’s books, too: Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina and Vodolazin’s Solovyov and Larionov, which, like Laurus, will be published by Oneworld Publications.

More finally: another thank you! Thank you for visiting the blog, whether you come by regularly or occasionally. I hope you continue to enjoy it and I wish you a very happy, healthy, and book-filled 2016!

Up Next: Sergei Nosov’s Curly Brackets, Yurii Buida’s Ceylon, and who knows what else… there are shelves and shelves of books hanging around, waiting to be read!

Disclaimers: The usual.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia. Book signing, publicist Becky Kraemer.

Fun with Cats: Starobinets's Catlantis

Sometimes I’m glad I hoard certain books for reading when I know I’ll need something fun and light. Case in point: Anna Starobinets’s Котлантида (Catlantis), which had been napping away on my shelf for several years, occasionally scratching for attention, until a few weeks ago. Catlantis, a children’s chapter book about a cat on a mission, was just the thing for a week that was too full of real-life existential questions (not to mention work on three books in various phases!) to read the sort of heavy-but-wonderful books I generally love so much. Beyond that, I’m glad to have read Catlantis before Jane Bugaeva’s translation comes out from Pushkin Children’s in October (PDF catalogue here, see page 14), just in time for holiday gift-giving.

Catlantis tells the tale of Baguette, a ginger cat who lives on the twelfth floor and loves to sit in the window birdwatching. Baguette doesn’t just watch birds, though: he’s also noticed Purriana, a slender, striped cat with a pink nose. Using Baguette’s family’s dog as a messenger, he and Purriana send each other notes—including Baguette’s poetry, which alludes to everything from Pushkin to favorite foods sources. Baguette, of course, has a competitor for Purriana’s velvety paw: the dreadful dump cat Noir.

Purriana agrees to marry Baguette if he can complete a quest assigned by her great-great grandmother: Baguette, who has powers for time travel, is to go to Catlantis and bring back a certain flower so cats can once again live nine lives. The book’s not very long so I’ll stop with the details here, though I will say that Baguette’s family misses him terribly while he’s away (they’d been planning to put bars on the window before he disappears) and Baguette, who’s of French descent, makes a stop in medieval Europe on his way back from Catlantis. Starobinets includes lots of wonderful word play—I’m sure Jane had tons of fun with that—and even manages to work in questions of religion and belief, related, of course, to black cats.

For my part, Catlantis’s puns and observations of cat peculiarities made me laugh out loud when I really needed to. On the more serious side, I appreciated the nine lives element since my real-life existential questions involved my grandmother’s last days: she lived 103 very full years, which must be the human equivalent of at least nine feline lives.

Up Next: Eugene Vodolzakin’s Solovyov and Larionov and Lena Eltang’s Cartagena, a complex murder mystery of sorts that I now seem to be reading slowly because I don’t want to finish it! Also, translators and publishers, please do send me titles and dates for this year’s releases: I’m hoping to post the 2015 translation list soon!

Disclaimers: The usual. I received my copy of Котлантида from Read Russia, thank you!

This post was approved by The Gang of Fur, Edwina and Ireland.