New Russian-to-English Translations Published in 2024

The promised Friday afternoon update: 

The final tally, as of January 3, is 32 books. (If, that is, I counted correctly!) That’s the same number we ended up with last year. And it’s a pleasant surprise. 

This year’s titles are so self-explanatory that the list doesn’t require much analysis. Perhaps what interests me most about this year’s list is something else that comes as no surprise at all: the fact that so many of the books are somehow connected with Ukraine and that so few are contemporary fiction. Once again, there are lots of classics on the list and it’s nice to see a couple of children’s books. Of these 32 titles, 19 were written by men, 12 by women, and one by a large selection of poets. 

My usual cautions remain so I’ll just copy last year’s, with a small edit:

As for disclaimers, caveats, and other details, I’m sure I missed some books, perhaps even a lot of books. As in years past, I’ve included books of all genres and ages. Please add a comment or e-mail me with changes/errors or additions; my address is on the sidebar. NB: Though I generally list only new translations (including retranslations), I do occasionally allow a few reprints and reissues. I’ll place a link to this post on the sidebar of the blog for easy future reference. I’m already taking names and titles for 2025, so please start sending them in. Finally, don’t forget the Self-Published Translation post, here: If you have a book to include, please add it in a comment on that page and I’ll be happy to approve it.

I clearly still have not started posting regularly again, though I thought a lot in 2024 about options for doing so. Nothing, however, felt quite right, though who knows when I might read a book that tells me I need to return to regular blogging... Whether I do or not, I want to thank all of you (yet again) for reading my Lizok posts. I also want to repeat something I wrote on New Year’s Eve in 2023: Meetings with many of you, be they in person, in Zoom meetings, or over email, are part of the pleasure of being a translator.  

Thank you for that. Again, here’s wishing you lots of good reading in 2025!

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And so, another year, another list of translations! I’m doing something a bit different this year: I’m posting the entries that I have today – and wishing you a happy (still-not-quite-here-in-my-time-zone) 2025 – but I’ll finish the list by Friday. This 2024^th year has been full of surprises right up until the very end so checking the rest of the publishers on my list has been the last thing on my mind! It’s hard to say how much I’ll find given that there are already nearly 30 titles on the list and last year’s total was 33.

If you’re a translator, writer, publisher, or other interested party who has a book to add to the list, please either email me (see sidebar for address) or add a comment and I’ll be sure to include the book.

And so (take two!), I’m off for now, to eat, read, and sit by the fire. I’ll add more entries as well as a bit of analysis (though I think the trends are pretty clear this year) and my “usual cautions” for the list within the next few days!

Here’s wishing everyone good health, good reading, and a more peaceful world in 2025.

Here’s the list of translations for 2024:

Aylisli, Akram: People & Trees: A Trilogy, translated by Katherine E. Young; Plamen Press.

Buzina, Varvara: Far & Away: Tales from Rural Russia, translated by Liv Bliss; Russian Life. With illustrations by Asya Lisina.

Ehrenburg, Ilya: Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya; Smokestack Books, March 2024.

Fadeeva, Olga: Water: Discovering the Precious Resource All Around Us, translated by Lena Traer; Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers.

Gogol, Nikolai: And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, translated by Oliver Ready; Pushkin Press.

Gordeeva, Katerina: Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Penguin Random House (imprint: WH Allen).

Gorky, Maxim and Scherr, Barry P.: The Old Man and The Counterfeit Coin: Two Plays, translated by Barry P. Scherr; Slavica Publishers. Slavica lists this as Scherr’s book but two plays is enough for me to put it on the list under Gorky (this is a translation list, after all!) along with Scherr’s name.

Ivanov, Alexei: The Food Block, translated by Richard Coombes; Glagoslav.

Khlebnikov, Velimir and Apollinaire, Guillaume: Birds, Beasts and a World Made New, translated by Robert Chandler; Pushkin Press.

Kurkov, Andrey: The Silver Bone, translated by Boris Dralyuk; MacLehose Press.

Luboshinsky, Vera: The Indian Diary of Vera Luboshinsky (1938-1945), edited and translated by Dušan Deák and Rowenna Baldwin; Oxford University Press.

Navalny, Alexei: Patriot, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Daiziel; Penguin Random House (imprint: Bodley Head).

Panaeva, Avdotya: The Talnikov Family, translated by Fiona Bell; Columbia University Press. I have a copy of The Talnikov Family and need to get on it, particularly since Fiona Bell’s translation looks very good.

Panyushkin, Valery: Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War, translated by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner; Europa Editions.

Pereverzin, Vladimir: The Prisoner: Behind Bars in Putin’s Russia, translated by Anna Gunin; Gemini Books/Ad Lib Publishers.

Podoroga, Valery: Mimesis: The Literature of the Soviet Avant-Garde, translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov; Verso.

Pushkin, Alexander: The Queen of Spades, translated by Anthony Briggs; Pushkin Press.

Rafeyenko, Volodymyr: The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad, translated by Sibelan Forrester; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (Rafeyenko now writes in Ukrainian.)

Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail: Foolsburg: The History of a Town, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Vintage (Penguin Random-House). (This is the novel known as simply История одного города, literally The History of a Town, in Russian.)

Samarqandi, Shahzoda: Mothersland, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Three String Books/Slavica Publishers. Mothersland was written in Tajik and Shelley translated the book from Yultan Sadykova’s “lyrical Russian” (as the book’s “about the translators” section calls it) translation of the book, titled Земля матерей. (This is another book that I have and need to finally read!)

Shaloshvili, Natalia: Miss Leoparda, translated by Lena Traer; Enchanted Lion Books. 

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 4, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Blue Lard, translated by Max Lawton; New York Review Books.

Sorokin, Vladimir: Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, translated by Max Lawton, New York Review Books.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary, translated by Anne O. Fisher; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stiazhkina, Olena: Cecil the Lion Had to Die, translated by Dominique Hoffman; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. (This book apparently begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian.) Bonus: Here’s an interview with Olena Stiazhkina, thanks to PEN America.

Tsvetaeva, Marina: Three by Tsvetaeva, translated by Andrew Davis; New York Review Books. 

Tsvetaeva, Marina: The Scale By Which You Measure Me: Poems 1913-1917, translated by Christopher Whyte; Shearsman Books. 

Teffi: And Time Was No More, translated by Robert Chander; Pushkin Press.

Various: Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya and Anna Krushelnitskaya; Slavica Publishers. Translators Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Dmitry Manin, and Josephine von Zitzewitz also worked on this bilingual edition. Thank you to Asymptote for publishing this piece about Dislocation. I attended an online reading earlier this year and it was painful, very moving.

Various: Lectures on Analytical Mechanics, translated by O.V. Karpushina and V.G. Serbo; Oxford University Press. We cover all genres here! The authors are G.L. Kotkin, V.G. Serbo, and A.I. Chernykh.

Zavalinsky, Igor: A Dream of Annapurna, translated by Michael and Jonathan Pursglove; Glagoslav.

 

Disclaimers and Disclosures. The usual. I know many of the translators, authors, and publishers whose work is on this list. Some of these books were provided to me by publishers, authors, literary agents.

English-Language Reading Roundup

This post has been incubating for months so I’ll get right to some quick notes on a few books I read in English in recent and not-so-recent months.

I’ll be honest: I requested a copy of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time from Restless Books because of the art, drawings by Matt McCann. Considering the book’s subtitle, I was also interested in Boris Fishman’s introduction, which does, indeed, address what I think of as the stereotypical Chekhov, plus the earthy Chekhov, with a bit of analysis of Chekhov’s writings (which Fishman confesses he didn’t always particularly love), as well as the relevance of Chekhov’s work in our current troubled times. Fishman wonders what Chekhov might have written about people living under certain political leaders. Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Which is how I felt when I read the first clump of stories – “Stories of Love,” which included “The Darling,” “Anna on the Neck,” “About Love,” and “The Kiss,” plus “The House With the Mezzanine,” from the “Slow Fiction” section – and felt an old funny sadness and sad funniness all over again. Chekhov often makes me feel like I’m being pricked by a pin, like I’m deflating, but I somehow enjoyed that odd sensation when reading these translations by Constance Garnett, which felt just as decent for the purpose now as they did when I read them in college. (I also learned from this book that Garnett considered her mode of dress “unambitious;” perhaps this is an area where she and I truly are peers.) The book also contains a mouth-watering version of “The Siren,” specially translated for this volume by Restless Publisher Ilan Stevens and Alexander Gurvets: Stevens apparently doesn’t know Russian so Gurvets served as his “informant” and the resulting descriptions of hungry people and food, particularly lots of fish, including sterlet, carp in sour cream… In any case, this volume would make a lovely holiday gift, one I’d especially recommend for readers new to Chekhov, for the stories as well as McCann’s evocative illustrations and Fishman’s gentle, humorous guidance.

I probably would have bought Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated by Jenny McPhee for New York Review Books, for a picture, too, if I hadn’t already known I wanted to read the book: I’ve always loved the painting on the cover, Yuri Pimenov’s New Moscow. Although The Kremlin Ball was never finished (something McPhee mentions in the first sentence of her foreword) I have to wonder if Malaparte’s account of Moscow in the late 1920s feels particularly honest and scathing – even voyeuristic in his gossipy accounts of famous personages, many from the “Marxist aristocracy” – because he never smoothed it. I’m not a big nonfiction reader but The Kremlin Ball (a title that tosses me back to Bulgakov’s account of “Satan’s Ball” in Master and Margarita every time I read or type it) sure kept me interested. How could I not want to read a book where Chapter 4 begins with “One Sunday morning I went to the flea market on Smolensky Boulevard with Bulgakov”? Or where there’s an account of requesting Lunacharsky’s permission (granted) to visit the apartment where Mayakovsky had committed suicide? McPhee’s translation read very nicely (I didn’t feel the anxiety about Russian material that I sometimes sense when I read translations about Russia that weren’t made from the Russian) and the book’s ten pages of endnotes contain some helpful background information.

Finally, there’s Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., which I finished late last winter but which still feels unusually vivid. This eight-hundred-page story of young Marina Makarova’s experiences during and after the October Revolution follows Marina through a storm of personal and public events, beginning with her comfortable upbringing and first love, and moving on to her second love and the collapse of both her country – she supports the revolution – and her relationship with her family. Fitch subjects Marina to ordeals that often correlate in some way to what’s happening around her – there’s violence that made me feel physical pain, for example, and she’s often in near-seclusion – but she also finds love and poetry. (Fitch’s acknowledgements note that translator Boris Dralyuk created “original translations for much of the Russian poetry that appears in this book.”) There’s lots more, including a snowy journey that felt cold, cold, cold and a semi-finale involving mysticism. I write “semi-finale” because I’m waiting for the sequel, which will apparently be out in July 2019.

Coming of age novels are pretty common but Fitch does a beautiful job pushing the genre’s boundaries – I meant what I said about feeling physical pain while reading – by serving up elements of high and low, poetry and the basest of behavior, vermin and astronomy, in a way that remind me of Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus, which critic Viktor Toporov so memorably called «высокое чтиво» (which I translated as “high-class pulp” when I blogged about the Stepnova book here). “High-class pulp” is probably one of my favorite categories (if that’s possible to say) of fiction because I so enjoy reading about the contrasting elements of the earthy (which often includes disturbing scenes) and the cerebral that these books so often seem to present. I should also note that The Revolution of Marina M. is very much a St. Petersburg/Petrograd novel so I particularly appreciated it after spending a short week in Petersburg last November. I’ve gone a bit light on details because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who’d like to read it. For more: The Los Angeles Times ran a nice piece by Fitch last November that offers detail on the book and her travel to St. Petersburg for research.

I’ve also amassed a small pile of other books – all translations – that I’ve read in part and enjoyed very much in recent years but intend to read more of now that I have them in printed book form:

• Horsemen of the Sands, by Leonid Yuzefovich, translated by Marian Schwartz, contains two novellas, Песчаные всадники (Horsemen of the Sands) and Гроза (The Storm), which I described in brief in an old post. I read a large chunk of Horsemen last year before Marian and I participated in a roundtable discussion during Russian Literature Week and am looking forward to reading the whole thing in print, in a lovely edition from Archipelago Books.
• The Land of the Stone Flowers: A Fairy Guide to the Mythical Human Being (Книга, найденная в кувшинке), by Sveta Dorosheva, translated by Jane Bugaeva, is exactly what the title says it is and chapters like “What is a Human?” and “About Human Objects and Residences” are illustrated by Dorosheva’s stylish and humorous drawings, many of which are in full color. Jane told me that Dorosheva even changed a few illustrations to fit the English translation: the book’s text (from which I translated excerpts some years ago) contains lots of idioms that can’t be rendered literally. This one’s a lot of fun and I am very happy that Jane had a chance to translate it. From Chronicle Books.
• Blue Birds and Red Horses, by Inna Kabysh, translated by Katherine E. Young, is a chapbook containing five poems. I’ve heard Katherine read many of her beautiful Kabysh translations at conferences and am glad some of them have made their way into this chapbook from Toad Press.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I received two review copies: the Chekhov book from Restless Books and the Yuzefovich book from Archipelago Press. Jane sent me a copy of The Land of the Stone Flowers and Katherine sent me a copy of Blue Birds and Red Horses. I bought the Fitch and Malaparte books at a local bookstore. Thanks to Restless and Archipelago for the review copies as well as, respectively, bonus books that look great: David Albahari’s Checkpoint, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Willem Frederik Hermans’s An Untouched House, translated by David Colmer. I’m wondering if the universe is telling me to resurrect my Other Bookshelf blog. I do think about that. It may happen.

Up next: Russian reading roundup, Big Book Award results and roundup, and Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island, which confounds me in some ways because Verkin piles on plot line after plot line but yet the story is so absorbing and Verkin’s post-apocalyptic future is so imaginative that I can’t help but keep reading.

2016 National Bestseller Award Short List & The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

The National Bestseller Award announced its short list this week. Here’s the list of five finalists—one short of the usual six—with the number of points each was awarded in the first round of voting. Comments on the finalists and the process, written by Vadim Levental, the NatsBest secretary, are online, as are jury members’ reviews and votes.

• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога (excerpt 1) (2) (3) (Winter Road) (12 points). I’ve been looking forward to Winter Road—which describes itself as a documentary novel—ever since it arrived at my house a month or so ago: I feel like I can’t go wrong with the combination of “documentary” and “novel” as well as, of course, Yuzefovich, Civil War figures, and Yakutia, a place I once spent several very wintery days.
• El’dar Sattarov’s Транзит Сайгон-Алматы (literally Transit Saigon-Almaty) (9 points). Sattarov’s apparently a fairly unknown writer from Kazakhstan: the book looks at the history of Vietnam during 1930 through the 1990s, apparently through the story of a partisan.
• Aglaya Toporova’s Украина трех революций (excerpt 1) (2) (3) (very literally Ukraine of Three Revolutions) (8 points). Levental notes Toporova’s “centrist position” and “calm ironic intonation” in describing events in Ukraine in recent years.
• Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part 1) (part 2) (Autochthons, I guess) (7 points). Autochthons sounds like a Galina-esque combination of phantasmagoria, magical realism, history, and a regular-guy hero. I’ll be starting on this one soon, too.
• Mikhail Odnobibl’s Очередь ([The?] Line) (5 points). Even Levental calls this one mysterious; he also describes the book as “Kafkaesque fantasy.” Beyond that, it’s unclear who Odnobibl really is. (An all-too-quick-because-it’s-a-sunny-day search for descriptions popped this piece, which I may take a better look at when the sky’s cloudier.)

Levental also mentions notable authors who missed the short list… picking up many of the same names I did: he praises Alexander Snegirev’s collection of short stories (which Snegirev sent to me and which looks very good), and Anna Matveeva’s novel but said he breathed a sigh of relief that Petr Aleshkovsky and Anatoly Kim missed out. I, too, was surprised that Andrei Astvatsaturov and Dmitrii Danilov received only one point each.

The NatsBest winner will be announced on June 5.

Bonus: A Rambling, Non-Scholarly, and Occasionally Gushy Translated Book Note. I finally (finally!) ordered up a copy of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinki, and containing translations by the editors plus a stellar list of several dozen additional translators, beginning, alphabetically, with Alexandra Berlina and ending with Katherine Young. I bought the anthology for what might be called “business with pleasure” reasons: for one thing, Russian novels often contain lines from well-known Russian poetry, transforming anthologies into reference books for me. For another, I like anthologies with introductory notes about authors and this book’s notes, written by Chandler and Dralyuk, are lively and informative. I also feel a special connection to the book after hearing related translator readings and conference presentations in June 2013 (previous posts).

Though I’ve only puttered with the book a little since I bought it on Tuesday—flipping to random pages and poets as I’m wont to do with collections like this and floating off on happy little tangents—I did take a closer look at one poem, Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Заклятие смехом,” which Christopher Reid’s “after Khlebnikov” interpretation renders as “Laugh Chant.” And which I liked very much because it tied my tongue and made me laugh, just like the original does when I read it aloud. I zaumed in on “Laugh Chant” thanks to Amateur Reader (Tom), who blogs at Wuthering Expectations, and who happens to be on a Russian poetry tear that’s included a recent post about The King of Time: Selected Writingsof the Russian Futurian, a 1985 volume with poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Although the beginning of Schmidt’s version of Khlebnikov’s laughter poem didn’t catch my feel for the poem like Reid’s does, the beautiful incantatory effect of Schmidt’s neologisms, rhyme, and even shifted hyphens (!) in a chunk of Khlebnikov’s play-that's-more-than-a-play, Zangezi, that appears in the Penguin collection bewitched me completely. Zangezi, by the way, was performed in the late 1980s; read about it in The New York Times, here. For a comparison of these same two versions of the laughter poem (as well as mentions of other humorous poems) see Alice E.M. Underwood’s Russian Life article, here.

Disclaimers: The usual as well as warm collegial/professional/personal relations with the editors of the Penguin book and many of the translators therein. I’ve translated excerpts of books by Galina as well as Vadim Levental’s entire novel Masha Regina, which is just out from Oneworld Publications and has even been spotted in the wild at McNally Jackson Books in New York City!

Up Next: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which I just plain loved. Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I may yet call Faith. Translations due out in 2016—send in those entries!

2015 Compass Award Results

I don’t read nearly as much Russian poetry as I should so the Compass Award, an annual translation contest, is a welcome way to get me thinking about poetry, one poet at a time. Boris Slutsky was the poet to translate for the 2015 contest year; winners were announced in early January. I somehow missed that, most likely thanks to my working-through-the-holidays haze, but announcements about yesterday’s ceremony and reading in New York City woke me up. I wish I could have gone! The winners are:

First prize: Peter Oram for “Poetic Proof.” I remembered Oram’s name from last year’s Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize, where Oram won second place with a very striking translation. (Previous post)
Second prize: Robin Kallsen for “Twentieth Century”
Third prize: Robin Kallsen for “There is a God”
Honorable Mention: Lawrence Bogoslaw for “People Fall Into 2 Camps”

The winning translations will be published in Cardinal Points Journal (vol. 6, March 2016) and the Storony sveta literary annual, in February 2017.

For more on Slutsky, I’ll turn things over to Jamie Olson, who’s posted twice about him. Click here for Jamie’s “Holding a Gaze,” which translates “О прямом взгляде,” and here for some thoughts on how Slutsky’s poetry reflects the times he lived in. Writes Jamie, “Throughout his work, Slutsky seems haunted by Soviet history and therefore intent upon revisiting it so as to comprehend it. By candidly examining his own past and thoughts, he emerges as both judge and interlocutor, providing an ethical context in which author and reader can interpret events together.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Compass chose Bella Akhmadulina as the poet for the 2016 award. Just for fun, to get you ready, let’s reprise this piece by Alexander Anichkin from Cardinal Points, about Akhmadulina’s “По улице моей” (“Along this street of mine”).

Up Next: Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Mebet then Boris Akunin’s Black City, a Fandorin novel that takes place in Baku (one of my favorite places to visit for work when I lived in Moscow). After the adrenaline rush of meeting three deadlines in two weeks—and a lovely bouquet it was, with a novel, a short story, and an article—it’s nice to hang out with Erast Petrovich for a little while and enjoy a different kind of adrenaline rush. I’ve got a nice pile of books to choose from after that…

Disclaimers: Irina Mashinski editor-in-chief of StoSvet, which runs this award, is a wonderful colleague.

New York Trip Report, Part One, Belated: Oliver Ready Wins 2015 Read Russia Prize

So much for timely trip reports about award ceremonies! That doesn’t mean I’m not still thrilled to say, more than two weeks later, that Oliver Ready received the 2015 Read Russia Prize for his translation of Vladimir Sharov’s До и во время, which Dedalus Books published with the title Before and During. I accepted the award for Oliver and am very excited for all involved: for Oliver, for Sharov, whom I met through Oliver, and for Dedalus Books.

Recognizing Oliver felt doubly appropriate because his Crime and Punishment translation was shortlisted for this year’s award, too. Given my interest in contemporary Russian literature, I’m especially happy Oliver won for the Sharov book—the decision came, by the way, through unanimous vote—both because I hope it draws attention to present-day writers and because I read and admired (previous post) Oliver’s translation.

Read Russia commended classics, too, by giving a special jury award to two new translations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Rosamund Bartlett’s translation was published by Oxford University Press and Marian Schwartz’s by Yale University Press. The jury’s statements on both awards are online here. I should note that this Read Russia Prize was for Russian-to-English translations only.

The Read Russia evening also included a talk from Gary Saul Morson, the man who taught me War and Peace twice: he spoke on the topic of “Because Everyone Needs a Little Russian Literature.” I’d wondered, in a previous post (about the Read Russia shortlist), if Dr. Morson took the title from a Read Russia bumper sticker. He did. My notes about his talk, alas, are even more inadequate than usual, most likely due to a combination of plain old tiredness after three days at BEA and excitement for Oliver.

I am happy to report, though, that, among other things, Dr. Morson quoted from a book by his pseudonym Alicia Chudo, noted the sense of moral urgency that Russian literature conveys, and spoke of literary characters as possible people, a formulation I like very much. Best of all, he read aloud, from translations: when I was a student, undergrad and grad, I didn’t understand why he read aloud to us, but have come to realize in recent years how much his readings helped me learn to hear the shadings of literary voices.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Alex Cigale gave me a copy of the spring/summer 2015 issue of Atlanta Review: Alex edited the issue and it includes four or five or six dozen translations of Russian poems. Alex pulled together a fantastic roster of fifty poets (Shamshad Abdullaev to Ivan Zhdanov, if taken in the Roman alphabet’s A to Z) and several dozen translators, many of whom I know and have heard read from and/or speak about their work. I’ve only read a small sliver of the issue—every time I open the journal, I get happily stuck on Alyssa Dinega Gillespie’s lush translation of a Polina Barskova poem that starts with “Sweetness of the sweetest slumber/Sweet is sweet is sweet is dream” because I love what Alyssa does with rhythm and rhyme—but I can’t wait to read more, poet by poet, translator by translator. Alex reminded me that readers can get tastes of the poems (as well as background) from the Atlanta Review Facebook group, where posts often include lots of links. If you’re looking for very short notes, there’s also Twitter!

Disclaimers: The usual, including work for Read Russia. Thank you to Alex Cigale for Atlanta Review.

Up Next: Trip report, Part Two, BookExpo America book fair and event report. And two books: Eugene Vodolazkin’s Solovyov and Larionov, which I’ll start translating this summer, meaning soon, and Sergei Nosov’s Член общества, или Голодное время (something like Member of the Society or A Time of Hunger), the sad-but-funny story of a man’s life after selling all his Dostoevsky. And then: I’m currently reading Elena Minkina-Taycher’s The Rebinder Effect, which I’m enjoying very much. Rebinder didn’t catch me on several previous tries so I’m glad I kept trying because I’m finding it very, very readable. After that, I’ll be starting my Big Book Award finalist marathon, beginning with Guzel’ Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which I’ve already started…

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.

Awards, Awards, Awards! Big Book, Compass & AATSEEL

The Big Book Awards were announced this evening in Moscow, and I’m particularly excited that Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Лавр (Laurus) won the first jury prize – regular visitors to the Bookshelf know how much I loved this book. Laurus already won the Yasnaya Polyana last month and it’s not often a book wins two major awards in one season. Second jury prize went to Sergei Beliakov’s Гумилев сын Гумилева (Gumilev, Son of Gumilev), which I’ve read parts of but can’t get too excited about, and third went to Iurii Buida for Вор, шпион и убийца (Thief, Spy, and Murderer), which I thought was best in its first half. Readers’ choices were Maya Kucherskaya’s Тетя Мотя (literally Auntie Motya but the Elkost literary agency is calling it Auntie Mina), which I also couldn’t get too excited about, followed by Gumilev and Laurus.

The Compass Award announced three winners for its 2013 competition, all awarded for translations of poems by Maria Petrovykh. Josephine von Zitzewitz won first prize, Alexandra Berlina took second prize, and Peter Oram received third, with Nora Krouk earning an honorable mention.

Finally, I’m especially late to mention the winner of AATSEEL’s “best translation into English” award, which was announced several weeks ago: The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov. AATSEEL is the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages… and I’m so dorky I always enjoy reading through all their lists of award nominees.

Disclaimers: The usual, including work on excerpts of Vodolazkin’s book.

Up Next: We’ll see…

Ragweed Season Miscellany

With ragweed season in full swing here in my part of the world, I was glad to find a few bits of news to post this week rather than trying to write anything coherent about Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina. The book deserves a lot better than what I could write up between my alternating urges to sneeze (from the pollen) and snooze (from the allergy pills). So, a few bits of news and comment…

First off, what could be a better birthday present for Lev Tolstoy than his very own (online!) portal, at (where else but?) Tolstoy.ru. The site plans to offer “Весь Толстой в один клик” (“All of Tolstoy in one click”)… ninety volumes of Tolstoy online. Only a little bit is available so far—the project just got started in mid-June—though a few PDFs are up and ready for downloading. Future formats will include .fb2 and ePub. There are already sections with photos and biographical information, though the English-language version of the portal is under construction. Also: The project is apparently still looking for volunteers. Information here.

Book of the Year awards were handed out last Wednesday—coinciding with the opening of the Moscow International Book Fair—to writers including Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Alexander Arkhangelsky. Yevtushenko won Book of the Year for Поэт в России — больше, чем поэт. Десять веков русской поэзии (A Poet in Russia Is More Than a Poet. Ten Centuries of Russian Poetry), a five-volume anthology; it appears that only the first volume is out. Arkhangelsky won Prose of the Year for his novel Музей Революции (Museum of the Revolution) and the “Poet” series of books from Leninzdat won the Poetry award. A full list of winners is available on the site of the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication, which organizes the awards and the book fair. The FAPMC piece noted that this year’s entertainment included ballet… it’s always sounded to me as if Book of the Year is the book award with the most lavish floor show. (And yes, it feels odd to even write that…)

Khlebnikov's grave, Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow.

I saved the best for last! It was a pleasant surprise to find a copy of Modern Poetry in Translation in my mailbox last week… and especially pleasant to have “Khlebnikov & Birdsong” catch my eye as soon as I unwrapped the journal. “Khlebnikov & Birdsong” is a lovely clutch of pieces that begins with MPT editor Sasha Dugdale’s “Transcribing Birdsong,” an introduction that includes a chunk of an essay by Alexander Ilichevsky about Velimir Khlebnikov, bird sounds, zaum, and language. Sasha’s introduction is followed by two translations of Khlebnikov’s “Там, где жили свиристели”: Peter Daniels’s “Timelings” and Edwin Kelly’s “Waxwings.” (“From the Ends to the Beginning” includes the original and another take on the poem here.) I particularly enjoyed the momentum, rhyme, and rhythm of Peter Daniels’s version, which feels very much like the original to me in both form and content, beginning with “Where the waxwings once were living.” Perhaps best of all, it read wonderfully to me on its own even before I looked up the original.

The two waxwing poems are followed by two more translations of Khlebnikov, also with introductions: Robert Chandler’s “Night in Persia” (“Ночь в Персии”) and Edwin Kelly’s “Garden of Animals” (“Зверинец”). I’ve always had a special fascination for Khlebnikov because I’ve always had a soft spot for zaum. Khlebnikov’s famous “Заклятие смехом”/“Incantation by Laughter” is probably as a good place as any to start reading him if he’s new for you. Back to MPT: this issue (no. 2, 2013) includes loads of other poems, featuring a “Romanian Focus” section, plus reviews, including James Womack’s piece about G.S. Smith’s As I Said, a translation of Lev Loseff’s Как я сказал.

Finally, an administrative note. Those of you who subscribe to my blog feed (by e-mail or blog/feed reader) might have noticed that you received three posts last week: there was a feed problem, which I fixed, so things should now be back to normal. I’m very grateful to the reader who sent a note last week asking why the feed hadn’t been updated since July. I usually monitor the feed more closely but, well, it’s been summer... I sometimes consider setting up a Facebook page to post links to new entries—is this something that (m)any of you would find useful, as an alternative to e-mail or blog/feed reader subscriptions?

Disclaimers. I’m translating a brief excerpt of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina. I work on projects for Read Russia, which is funded by FAPMC. And I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Peter Daniels, Robert Chandler, and Sasha Dugdale in Oxford and London this past June. A very special thanks to Sasha for the copy of Modern Poetry in Translation!

Up Next: Levental’s Masha Regina and then Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Petrovich, a low-key novel-in-stories about a boy.