Better-late-than-never posts seem to have become a bit of a habit
here at the Bookshelf. Then again, this does seem to be award season: posts
about the Big Book shortlist, Yasnaya Polyana longlist, and NatsBest winner will
all be on the way relatively soon, too. In a more timely manner. I hope.
For now, though, a few bits of old news.
I’m often remiss in writing about the annual
Pushkin House Book Prize since it covers
only nonfiction, but this year’s
shortlist includes
a few titles that sound particularly interesting even to a fiction freak like me. One, Teffi’s
Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea,
is a translation by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson,
and Irina Steinberg, with an introduction by Edyth C. Haber. Another is Daniel
Beer’s
The House of the Dead: Siberian
Exile Under the Tsars, which I’ve been interested in since reading several enthusiastic
reviews when it was released. (I suspect the title helps, too, since I thought
Dostoevsky’s
House of the Dead was so
good…) And then there’s Simon Sebag Montefiore’s
The Romanovs: 1613-1918, which sounds especially vivid. The other
titles—Rosalind P. Blakesley’s
The Russian
Canvas, Anne Garrels’s
Putin Country,
and Simon Morrison’s
Bolshoi Confidential—help
create a nicely rounded shortlist. Pushkin House’s page with the
shortlist includes
links to helpful individual pages about each book so I’ll leave the details to
them. The winner will be announced on June 7.
And then there’s the
Russian
Prize, the Русская Премия—for writers who live
outside Russia and write in Russian—which was awarded in late April, just when
I was so caught up in finishing a translation that I completely missed the news.
Oops. Mikhail Gigolashvili won the long fiction award for his
Тайный год (
The Secret Year, I guess…), which should arrive at my doorstep any
day now. Second and third prizes went to, respectively, Shirin Shafieva for
Сальса и Веретено (
Salsa and Vereteno) and Vladimir Lidskii for
Сказки нашей крови. Метароман (hmm, maybe
The Fairytales of/in Our Blood.
A Metanovel, or even “tall tales,” depending on the book…). Short fiction
awards went to Tatiana Dagovich, Leia Liubomirskaia, and the team of Andrei
Zhvalevskii and Evgenia Pasternak, and poetry awards were made to Gennadii
Rusakov, Sergei Solovyov, and Oleg Iuriev. All titles, along with countries of residence
and brief descriptions, are available on the information-packed
Год литературы site,
here,
or on the Russian Prize site,
here.
Finally, two brief items on translations. I’m very excited that
my translation of Vadim Levental’s
Masha
Regina, published by
Oneworld, is
a finalist for this year’s
Oxford-Weidenfeld
Translation Prize, which will announce results on June 3. Contemporary Russian
fiction was represented on the 2017 Best Translated Book Award prose
shortlist,
too, by
Oblivion (
Предел
забвения
in Russian), written by Sergei Lebedev, translated by Antonina
Bouis, and published by
New
Vessel Press. Since this one’s all over, I’ll mention that the BTBA winner
for prose was Lúcio Cardoso’s
Chronicle of
the Murdered House, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
and Robin Patterson and published by
Open
Letter Books. The poetry winner was Alejandra Pizarnik’s
Extracting the Stone of Madness,
translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert, and published by
New
Directions.
Up Next: There’s a bit of a backlog around here, particularly with
more award posts coming… There’s also 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 was 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 not long ago.
There’s also a shortish novel by Aleksandr Gadol that won third place in last
year’s Russian Prize competition… I just finished it but it got under my skin
enough that I may write about it first.
