NOS(E) Awards Go to Gorbunova and Barskova

The NOS(E) Award held its annual ceremony last week, presenting its jury prize to Alla Gorbunova for her Конец света, моя любовь (The End of the World, My Love). The critics’ panel prize went to Polina Barskova for her Седьмая щелочь: тексты и судьбы блокадных поэтов (The Seventh Alkali [a sort of cleansing wave/wash]: The Texts and Fates of Blockade Poets). The readers’ choice award went to Ragim Dzhafarov’s Сато (Sato). I haven’t (yet) read any of the books but have a few notes to add...

• Languagehat is way ahead of me on reading Gorbunova. He blogged about The End of the World, My Love last summer, here. I did, finally, buy Вещи и ущи, which is winging (or maybe swimming?) its way to me from Russia. I’ve never been very good about keeping at short story collections but Gorbunova’s books look and sound promising.
• Words Without Borders published “#Russophonia: New Writing in Russia” last week and the selection includes several of Gorbunova’s stories from Вещи и ущи, which translator Elina Alter calls Ings & Oughts. There is also video of Gorbunova reading one of the stories. Here’s the title page for “#Russophonia”. And there’s more! Kelly Writers House hosted an online “#Russophonia” program that you can watch here. There’s lots of good stuff in both places!
• Deep Vellum will be publishing translations of Gorbunova’s two story collections. (This is a very recent signing; I know nothing else!)

Up Next: Most likely Vodolazkin’s Оправдание Острова, which I’m rereading (a printed copy is such a relief!) and which I think I’ll continue calling History of Island, at least for now. As I’ve mentioned before, recent months have brought lots of unexpected and/or unsolicited electronic and print books, resulting in some weird reading habits! I’m hoping for an on-paper reread of one of those unexpected books very soon, too.

Disclaimers & Disclosures: The usual, for a couple of the figures and entities mentioned in this post.

NOS(E) Award Shortlists – 2020-2021

As if last week’s U.S. elections weren’t enough, there’s literary excitement to report: shortlists for the 2020-2021 NOS(E) Award! The best benefit of my full NOS(E) longlist posts (this year’s is here) is that (even on a tired day) they’re ready to be repurposed into shortlist posts with just a bit of cut/paste. So here I go now. Right after noting that the winners will be announced in early 2021.

First, the jury’s shortlist, ten books:

• Shamshad Abdullaev: Другой юг (The Other South). This is Abdullaev’s first book of prose – apparently all of it – and the publisher promises (among other things that I’ll summarize and paraphrase from the description) a hypnotic Central Asian landscape and nonlinear techniques reminiscent of Proust and Beckett. (Do click through on Abdullaev’s name for more on his life and poetry, some of which has been translated.)  
• Polina Barskova: Седьмая щелочь: тексты и судьбы блокадных поэтов (The Seventh Alkali [which is a sort of cleansing wave/wash]: The Texts and Fates of Blockade Poets). This book covers work by Gennady Gor, Pavel Zaltsman, Natalya Krandievskaya, Tatyana Gnedich, Nikolai Tikhonov, Sergei Rudakov, and Zinaida Shishova. The mysterious title (explained here, in Igor Gulin’s review for Kommersant) comes from a poem by Krandievsksya.
• Maria Buras: Истина существует. Жизнь Андрея Зализняка в рассказах ее участников (Truth Exists. Andrei Zaliznyaka’s Life As Told By Those Involved or somesuch). Zaliznyak, who died in 2017, was a linguist who studied very old literature and documents, including those written on birchbark (!!! This makes me want to learn more!). Buras was his student and friend.
• Andrei Gogolev: Свидетельство (Evidence, perhaps?). Hm, this one is especially mysterious.
• Alla Gorbunova: Конец света, моя любовь (It’s the End of the World, My Love). Short stories set in the 1990s and 2000s.
• Ragim Dzhafarov: Сато (Sato). Apparently the story of a child who thinks he’s being held hostage and is brought to a psychologist.
• Aleksei Dyachkov: Хани, БАМ (Khani, BAM). Stories set during work on the Baikal-Amur Mainline
• Evgenia Nekrasova: Сестромам (Sistermom, see the comments, below, for Languagehat’s note on the book’s subtitle) (title story). Short stories, of which I have read (and very much appreciated) several.
  
• Vitaly Terletsky (with artist Katya): Собакистан (Dogistan, perhaps, though that’s awfully close to Dagestan…). Comics. Dystopia. Dogs. Colta has a big interview with Terletsky and Katya here, about two of their books.
• Mikita Franko: Дни нашей жизни (Days of Our Life). A novel about a boy whose life seems typical. But has lots of secrets. The description and even the reader reviews/comments on livelib.ru seem very concerned about spoilage so I didn’t read much about it… though whilst googling around, I found that articles on Days of Our Life often mention LGBT families right up front, including in this interview with the author.

The critics’ panel, which chose eight books, saw things a little differently. That group chose the books by Abdullaev, Barskova, Gorbunova, and Nekrasova, plus four others:

• Olga Allenova: Форпост. Беслан и его заложники (Outpost. Beslan and Its Hostages). The sad title here is self-explanatory. Allenova has been a special correspondent for Kommersant, a newspaper, since 2000.
• Fyodor Derevyankin: Смерти нет. Краткая история неофициального военного поиска в России (There Is No Death. A Brief History of Unofficial Military Search[es?] in Russia. Based on what Gorky Media writes, this book contains stories of people who rebury soldiers who died during World War 2.
• Tatyana Zamirovskaya: Земля случайных чисел (The Land of Random Numbers). A collection of (per BGS Literary Agency) metaphysical/fantasy/horror short stories, of which I have read several.
• Nikolai Kononov: Гимны (Hymns) (excerpt). Apparently a book about memory. Proust strikes again, with a mention in this Kommersant review! (With memory books and Proust references abounding these days – including in This Tilting World, by Colette Fellous, which I read in Sophie Lewis’s translation – I started on Proust a couple months ago and am happily getting ready to finish volume two of In Search of Lost Time, thanks to a slow-reading group on Twitter.)

Up Next: Inga Kuznetsova’s Intervals. And some other good things.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual, due to dealings (in a good sense!) with some of the authors, publishers, and agents involved with some of these books; I received electronic copies of two or three.

Translation Award News: AATSEEL & Read Russia/Anglophone

The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages announced the winner of AATSEEL’s annual translation award this weekend. The winner is Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Polina Barskova and including works by Gennady Gor, Dmitry Maksimov, Sergey Rudakov, Vladimir Sterligov, and Pavel Zaltsman. The translators are Anand Dibble, Ben Felker-Quinn, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebekah Smith, Charles Swank, Jason Wagner, and Matvei Yankelevich. The book was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and includes an introduction by Barskova and an afterword by Ilya Kukulin. Written in the Dark is a bilingual edition with endnotes. I have the book and have read quite a few of the poems. Yes, I recommend it, though I’m pretty inept at writing about poetry, so will leave details to Piotr Florczyk’s review for Los Angeles Review of Books, which includes this line about Gor’s poems, “For the most part untitled, and rhyming in the original Russian but less frequently in translation, these poems are surreal indeed, and even macabre.”

In other translation award news, Written in the Dark also made the shortlist for this year’s English-only Read Russia Prize for translation. The finalists are, in the order listed on the Read Russia site:

• Written in the Dark (please see extensive details above!)
• Rapture, by Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich), translated by Thomas J. Kitson; Columbia University Press.
• The Gray House (Дом, в котором), by Mariam Petrosyan, translated by Yuri Machkasov; AmazonCrossing.
• Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg; New York Review Books/Pushkin Press.
• Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Anastasia Tolstoy, Robert Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn, Ivan Juritz, Donald Rayfield, Boris Dralyuk, Justin Doherty, Dmitri Nabokov, Irina Steinberg, and Rose France; Penguin Classics.

Congratulations to everybody involved with all these books!

Up Next: The NOSE Award winner tomorrow. I was glad to see that Sorokin’s Manaraga, which I enjoyed, already won the reader’s choice award. Also: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, which I already mentioned enjoying very, very much. Some English-language titles. And the sequel to Yakovleva’s Tinker, Tailor, which has been just the sort of slow-action detective novel I needed for a busy time.

Disclaimers: The usual, in full force since I’ve collaborated with many of the translators and publishers on this list, not to mention Read Russia!