Russian-to-English Translations for 2019

It’s not quite December but I’ve decided to post this year’s list of new Russian-to-English translations. If I’ve counted correctly (something I cannot guarantee), the list contains 49 50 52 53 54 55 books. I’m sure that number will change (upward, I hope) in the coming days. And weeks, months, and years: these lists are never finished.

This year’s total is down from last year’s 67 (previous post) but still up a bit from 2017’s 47 (previous post). One reason for the decrease is that I’m not listing new reprints/editions of existing translations. Another factor [which I’ve edited heavily] that probably has more of a psychological effect than a statistical effect at this point: I noticed that Glagoslav looks to have released in 2019 a couple of titles that were on lists in past years (such as the Grishkovets book below, which was first listed in 2017) and thus (if only in my twisted perception as compiler of these lists!) even if numbers aren’t that different, it appears there are fewer from-the-Russian titles this year since some of them have long been familiar; at the same time, it also appears they’re increasing their work on translations from other languages, though I confess I don’t track those translations closely enough to say this is anything but my own impression. I also wonder if those non-Russian titles are featured more prominently after Glagoslav changed its site design. Which leads me to another point... Finally, some publishers have reworked their sites and it sometimes feels like there were fewer pages specifically dedicated to new releases, making them harder to find; of course many sites’ search functions don’t always return useful lists when asked about “Russia” or “Russian.” All this means I’m pretty content finding forty-nine books. I should also add that I’ve been lax about the tedious task of moving books on the 2018 list that apparently (“apparently” since soft releases seem to have become more common) weren’t released until 2019; that probably gives a plus/minus factor of several books. (I may shift some of those later but for now my preferred form of correction has been on adding titles to old posts after learning of books I missed in years past.)

In terms of positives for 2019, it’s nice to see more children’s books again this year. (Two series!) I’m disappointed, though, that the share of books translated by women doesn’t seem to have risen much, though at least it doesn’t look it’s dropped. Fifteen out of forty-four books authored by only one person were written by women and at least four out of the five written by “various” had at least one woman on the author list. These lists are dynamic enough – not to mention plenty incomplete – that I wouldn’t want to make too much of any of these data. I was going to add that I’m disappointed that there aren’t more works of contemporary Russian fiction on the list. But then I scrolled down and realized the variety is better than I thought. And 2020 already looks interesting, too; I’ve started a list for next year.

As in past years, I have to credit ongoing grant programs from the Institute of Translation and the Prokhorov Fund’s Transcript Program for helping to fund some of the translations on the list. And for making it a little easier to compile my annual lists. This year I also had a nice assist from a list put together by Hilah Kohen for Meduza: in January I shared my then-nascent 2019 list with her when she was gathering titles for a very eclectic list of Russia-related books, many of which are translations. She credits lots of our colleagues for contributing suggestions and I highly recommend browsing her list. Some of the publication dates have slipped but that just gives us something to look forward to in 2020.

I’ll finish, as usual, with some caveats and admin notes related to the list. This list is just a start; I’m always happy to add titles I’ve missed. Please e-mail me with changes/errors or additions; my address is on the sidebar. NB: I now list only new translations. I’ve linked titles on the list to publishers’ pages wherever possible. I’ll place a link to this post on the sidebar of the blog for easy reference. I’m taking names and titles for 2020 now, so please start sending them in. Finally, don’t forget the Self-Published Translation post: If you have a book to add, please add it in a comment on that page, here, and I’ll be happy to approve it.

Enjoy your reading!

Akunin, Boris: Not Saying Goodbye, translated by Andrew Bromfield; W&N, November 2019. 

 

Aleshkovsky, Yuz: Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage, translated by Duffield White, edited by Susanne Fusso; Columbia University Press, Russian Library, June 2019.

Alexievich, Svetlana: Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Penguin, July 2019.

(Brianchaninov) St. Ignatius : The Refuge: Anchoring the Soul in God, translated by Nicholas Kotar; Holy Trinity Publications, December 2019.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and edited by Sarah J. Young; Oxford University Press, June 2019.

Egunov-Nikolev, Andrei: Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral, translated by Ainsley Morse; Academic Studies Press, May 2019.

Gandlevsky, Sergey: Illegible, translated by Suzanne Fusso; Cornell University Press, November 2019. Background on this novel.

Gogol, Nikolai: And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, translated by Oliver Ready; Pushkin Press, December 2019.

Gorbachev, Mikhail: On My Country and the World, translated by George Shriver; Columbia University Press, December 2019.

(Gribanovsky) Metropolitan Anastasy: Conversations With My Heart: Contemplations on God and the World, translated by Nicholas Kotar; Holy Trinity Publications, 2019.

Grishkovets, Evgeni: The Hemingway Game, translated by Steven Volynets; Glagoslav Publications, 2019.

Grossman, Vasily: Stalingrad, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler; New York Review Books, June 2019.

Kandinsky, Wassily: Sounds, translated and introduced by Elizabeth R. Napier; Yale University Press, October 2019.

Khemlin, Margarita: Klotsvog, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Columbia University Press/Russian Library, August 2019.

Khodasevich, Vladislav: Necropolis, translated by Sarah Vitali; Columbia University Press, Russian Library, May 2019.

Kollontai, Alexandra: Writing Through Struggle, translated by Cathy Porter; Haymarket. (I’m not sure what happened to this title and am going to strike it for now.)

Lebedev, Sergei: The Goose Fritz, translated by Antonina W. Bouis; New Vessel Press, 2019.

Litvina, Alexandra: The Apartment: A Century of Russian History, translated by Antonina W. Bouis; Abrams Books for Young Readers, November 2019. Illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya. This looks like a good one for kids of all ages!

Medvedev, Sergei: The Return of the Russian Leviathan, translated by Stephen Dalziel; Polity Press, November 2019.

Medvedeva, Doba-Mera: Daughter of the Shtetl: The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva, translated by Alice Nakhimovsky, edited by Nakhimovsky and Michael Beizer; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

Monastyrski, Andrei: Elementary Poetry, translated by Brian Droitcour and Yelena Kalinsky with a preface by Boris Groys; Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2019.

Novikov, Dmitry: A Flame Out at Sea, translated by Christopher Culver; Glagoslav Publications, 2019.

Osipov, Maxim: Rock, Paper, Scissors, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson; New York Review Books, April 2019.

Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater; The Folio Society, 2019. (This is a limited special edition book.)

Pavlova, Karolina: A Double Life, translated by Barbara Heldt; Columbia University Press/Russian Library, August 2019.

Poliakova, Zinaida: A Jewish Woman of Distinction: The Life and Diaries of Zinaida Poliakova, by ChaeRan Y. Freeze and translated by Gregory L. Freeze; Brandeis University Press, 2019. This book is a bit of a cheat since it’s not just translated material but it sounds too interesting to leave off the list!

Polonskaya, Anzhelina: To the Ashes, translated by Andrew Wachtel; Zephyr Press, 2019.

Rubina, Dina: Leonardo’s Handwriting, translated by Melanie Moore; Glagoslav Publications, late 2019.

Savinkov, Boris: Pale Horse, translated by Michael R. Katz; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.

Seisenbayev, Rollan: The Dead Wander in the Desert, translated by John Farndon and Olga Nakston; Amazon Crossing, 2019.

Sentsov, Oleg: Life Went on Anyway, translated by Uilleam Blacker; Deep Vellum, October 2019.

Slavnikova, Olga: The Man Who Couldn’t Die, translated by Marian Schwartz; Columbia University Press/Russian Library, January 2019.

Soloviev, Vladimir: The Karamazov Correspondence: Letters of Vladimir S. Soloviev, translated by Vladimir Wozniuk; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 2, translated by Marian Schwartz; University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.

Starobinets, Anna: A Predator’s Rights: A Beastly Crimes Book, translated by Jane Bugaeva; Dover, January 2019

Starobinets, Anna: Claws of Rage, translated by Jane Bugaeva; Dover, September 2019. More beastly crimes.

Starobinets, Anna: The Plucker, translated by Jane Bugaeva; Dover, October 2019. Beastly crimes again!

Stonov, Dmitry: The Raskin Family, translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

(Taushev), Archbishop Averky : Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament, translated by Nicholas Kotar, edited by Vitaly Permiakov; Holy Trinity Publications, 2019.

Tazhi, Aigerim: Paper-Thin Skin, translated by James Kates; Zephyr Press, May 2019.

Tolstoy, Leo: Lives and Deaths, translated by Boris Dralyuk; Pushkin Press, November 2019.

Tretyakov, Sergei: I Want a Baby and Other Plays, translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland; Glagoslav Publications, 2019.

Tynianov, Yuri: Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film, translated by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, with an introduction by Daria Khitrova; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

Ulitskaya, Ludmila: Jacob’s Ladder¸ translated by Polly Gannon; FSG, July 2019.

Utkin, Alexander: The Water Spirit, translated by Lada Morozova; Nobrow, 2019. This is a graphic novel, the second in the “Gamayun Tales” series, for children, drawn and written by Utkin.

Utkin, Alexander: Tyna of the Lake, translated by Lada Morozova; Nobrow, 2019. A third installment of “Gamayun Tales.”

Various: New Russian Drama, edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt; Columbia University Press/Russian Library, August 2019.

Various: The Predictability of the Past: Three Contemporary Russian Plays, translated and edited by Alexander Rojavin; Three String Books/Slavica, 2019.

Various: 21: Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century, edited by Mark Lipovetsky and translated by a very good “various”; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

Various: A Life Replaced, written/translated by Olga Livshin; Poets & Traitors Press, 2019. Original poetry by Livshin along with her translations of Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman.

Various: Russian Stories, edited by Christopher Keller, translator list unclear; Everyman’s Library, 2019. This collection includes 25 stories, “Pushkin and Gogol to Tatyana Tolstaya and Svetlana Alexievich.”

Various: Cold War Casual, edited and translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya; Front Edge Publishing, 2019. Bilingual; oral history/interviews on the Cold War.

Yakhina, Guzel: Zuleikha, translated by Lisa Hayden; Oneworld Publications, February 2019.

Yesenin, Sergei: The Last Poet of the Village, translated by Anton Yakovlev; Sensitive Skin Books, 2019. A bilingual book.

Zviagentsev, Alexander: The Nuremberg Trials, translated by Christopher Culver; Glagoslav, 2019.

Zygar, Mikhail: Eyewitness 1917: The Russian Revolution as it Happened, translated by Rose France and Lev Shtutin, I believe; Fontanka, 2019. Click through on the title link (which will take you to Pushkin House) to learn more about this book, which should appeal to anyone who enjoyed Project 1917.

!!Bonus Listings!!

I can’t help but include a few bonus listings from Central Asian languages, translated by either Shelley Fairweather-Vega or Christopher Fort. I want to add that Shelley (a friend and colleague) translates from the Russian, Uzbek, and Kazakh, and translated each of the books listed below using multiple versions that always included either Uzbek or Kazakh manuscripts. There’s an interesting essay by Fort about his translation work on Cho’lpon here; [edit] see below for his comment noting another book.

Asemkulov, Talasbek: A Life at Noon, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Three String Books/Slavica, 2019. A Kazakh novel.

Ismailov, Hamid: Gaia, Queen of Ants, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Syracuse University Press, 2019.

Ismailov, Hamid: Of Strangers and Bees, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; Tilted Axis Press, 2019.

Cho’lpon, Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li: Day and Night, translated from the Uzbek by Christopher Fort; Academic Studies Press, 2019.

Other bonuses: Academic Studies Press has a sampler available for download here; it includes excerpts from a nice combination of ASP’s books on my 2018 and 2019 lists… Cambridge University Press partnered with the National Bureau of Translations in Kazakhstan to produce anthologies of works of Kazakh poetry and prose that were translated into the English from the Russian (after, in some/many cases, having been translated from the Kazakh to the Russian); the anthologies were commissioned by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Culture and Sport and are available for free download… and, finally, to end on an unusual note, poet and translator Katherine Young translated a very interesting-looking calendar: Boris Pasternak: A Poetic Calendar 2020, from B.S.G.-Press Book Company. The calendar contains poems as well as commentary and background by Natalya Ivanova. There’s an article about the Russian-language version of the calendar here.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual. I’ve received some of the books on the list from publishers and/or translators and I know many of the translators. Thank you to Hilah Kohen for compiling her list for Meduza! (I wish I’d remembered to use it earlier in my collection process!)

Up Next: Biographies (Brik and Erofeev), two books in English (soon, really!), and then a novel.

London Book Fair 2019 Trip Report, the No-Notes-Means-Minimal-Substance Edition

That’s right: I took no notes at any of the events I attended or participated in during the week of the London Book Fair. I slacked. I’ve pieced together a bit, though, based on memory…

I suppose I have a bit of an excuse for shirking during the first event I attended, since it took place roughly twelve hours after landing at Gatwick and roughly thirty hours after my last real (lying in a bed) sleep. The event was a book club meeting with Alexei Salnikov, who discussed his Отдел (The Department) at the Waterstones/Piccadilly store. In some ways, jetlag was the ideal state for me to be in since I hadn’t yet read the book and didn’t want spoilers; thanks to jetlag, there was no need to tune anything out! Now that I’ve read the book, I think that attending without really processing the conversation was perfect. Among other things, I probably would have disbelieved what people said about The Department. And attending without really listening/retaining fits beautifully with the novel’s absurdity. As did the intensity and urgency of the conversation, which I (think I) do remember. I’ll be writing about the book soon and will only add for now that the book was deeply unsettling in all the right ways. So I loved it.

Thank goodness for real sleep: Day Two included two events! A translation roundtable at the Russian stand brought together eight translators, moderated by Hamid Ismailov, whose The Devils’ Dance, translated by Donald Rayfield with John Farndon, recently won the EBRD Literature Prize.

Photo: Anastasia Kornienko

Here we are, left to right: Donald Rayfield, Robert Chandler, me (I was cold, not critical!), Oliver Ready, Hamid Ismailov, Alexander Chantsev, Arch Tait, Ola Wallin, and Carol Ermakova. I remember a few things: mentioning my translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog for the Russian Library and saying that I look for books that I enjoyed reading and think I will enjoy translating – I see having fun as a critical part of the process. Also: Donald Rayfield learned Uzbek to translate The Devils’ Dance and Carol Ermakova spoke of her translations of Elena Chizhova’s novels. Other details are too murky to mention since I don’t want to get anything wrong or, heaven forbid, start rumors. Day Two also brought me back to Waterstones: Guzel Yakhina spoke, primarily about her Zuleikha, which recently came out in my translation for Oneworld Publications. I talked for a short bit about the translation, addressing (Ура, I remember this part!) how we handled the Tatar words in the Russian text: transliterating and italicizing those that the text already explained, but just translating the rest. This was a lucky case where the Russian text held the perfect solution.

The evening of Day Three took me to Pushkin House for a screening of the first episode of the series Хребет России (The Ridge of Russia), about the Urals, followed by Q&A with author Alexei Ivanov and moderator Anastasia Koro. Thank goodness there’s information here, on the Pushkin House site, about the event and how everything (and everybody) fits together! Tales of Yermak were particularly memorable, though the linguist in me was most fascinated that Ivanov and TV guy Leonid Parfyonov, who’s also part of this road-trip-esque series, stressed different syllables in the plural of the word for Cossack. This struck me because a friend has noted a couple of times that she prefers the stress as казáки; I’d been stressing endings. (There’s lots on the Internet about this stressful topic, here, for example. Fear not: basically, either way is fine. Ozhegov and my two orthographical dictionaries also show stress patterns both ways for the plural, with the root endings as second choice.) Bonus: Yulia Zaitseva, who’s also in the series (she even hang glides!), was in attendance at Pushkin House, too.

Day Four was especially eventful for a roundtable I participated in with Guzel Yakhina, literary agent Julia Goumen, and Glagoslav editor Ksenia Papazova: “Women in Literature & Translation: Realities and Stereotypes,” moderated by Daniel Hahn. There were so many subtopics that it’s very hard to summarize, let alone offer much context, but things began with a brief talk from Guzel during which, among other things, she talked about Zuleikha and said she’d never felt she’d been discriminated against for being a woman. We ended with audience questions, including one from a man who’s interested in translating a woman author. (I hope his project works out!) Other topics included book covers, author age, and specific writers, including Valentina Nazarova, Elena Chizhova, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I talked about the role translators, particularly women, can/should take in working toward ensuring more women’s books are translated and published, noting that since more women writers tend to be translated by women than men (during Q&A, though, I made sure to give men their due and specifically mentioned Arch Tait, whose authors I didn’t list; they include Ulitskaya and Alexievich, among others) we need to actively read, scout, and properly pitch projects if we want to close the gap. (For some stark statistics on how few translated books are written by women, please see this interview with Chad Post from the London Show Daily for 14 March 2019.) I seem to recall repeating that plenty of Russian women are writing high-quality books that deserve to be translated, adding “It’s only fair!” several times. Post-LBF, my biggest hope is that more (“all” is probably asking too much!) translators, agents, scouts, publishers, and others in the industry – men or women – will think more about these disparities when they read, research, and consider projects. Our choices and decisions matter. My reward for finishing my events

Mushy peas, no thanks. Photo: Ilona Chavasse

during the trip was a hot lunch – an old favorite, fish and chips! – with translator colleague and friend Ilona Chavasse (translator of, among others, Yuri Rytkheu – their A Dream in Polar Fog awaits me…), who stealthily immortalized my meal when I stepped away from the table for a minute. The perfect capper to the book fair was Chris Gribble’s half-hour “in conversation” Q&A with Jeremy Tiang, LBF’s first-ever Literary Translator of the Fair. And an excellent choice he was: he’s a thoughtful speaker and I particularly appreciate the wisdom, gentle humor, and love with which he speaks about the realities of literary translation. In an interview with Michelle Johnson of World Literature Today, he said something that I think particularly deserves to be read, remembered, and repeated, repeated, repeated: “Literary translators are artists in our own right. Treat us as partners in a creative process, not functionaries. We have a lot to offer.”

And that’s about it for public events! I did bring home piles of books, most in English… I’m currently enjoying Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk in Sora Kim-Russell’s translation (after loving Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole in Kim-Russell’s translation, this one called out to me, then turned up on the international Booker longlist later in the week!) and have plenty more on the shelves, including Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, and Frank Wynne’s translation of Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex 2, which I just had to buy after reading VS 1 last year, thanks to the good people of Despentes’s UK publisher, MacLehose Press, who gave me a copy at the Frankfurt book fair. VS 1 is apparently on the way to the US in late 2019, from FSG.

Disclaimers, Disclosures, and Thanks: The usual. Thank you to Read Russia for bringing me to the London Book Fair and giving me books, too!

Up Next: Salnikov’s The Department, which may take a bit of time to process and come to terms with, thanks to a powerful combination of absurdity, unease, tension, and even coziness. The NatsBest shortlist. And then another book. It’s hard to know what to read after The Department.

Becoming a Literary Translator

Enough people write to me asking how to become literary translators that I’ve long intended to write something resembling a how-to post. Thank goodness I was saved by Susan Bernofsky, who translates from the German into the English and wrote a post (here!) covering the basics. Best of all, her suggestions are pretty close to what I would have said had I written the post: what she outlines is a lot like what I did when I was getting started. So rather than writing about those basics, I’m going to add a few more suggestions and bits of advice, many/most of which are somehow connected to what Susan writes. I never give individual advice to translators because I think we all need to find our own paths to the profession, based on our interests and skills. What I write about here is what worked for me but of course it may not work for you. One other thing: I’ll write from the perspective of a native speaker of English who translates from Russian to English, so just substitute your own languages if that’s not your angle!

Read a Lot. This, like everything else in this post, probably sounds ridiculously, even insultingly, obvious… but reading is what helped me most as I found my way, so it’s always my first answer when people ask me about becoming a translator. Or about what to translate. Read as much as you can in Russian to learn what’s being written, what you like to read, and what you might want to translate. Журнальный зал is a great source of new literature. Read as much as you can in English—books written in English and books translated into English—for the same reasons. Read periodicals, too, for world news, literary news, stories, essays, vocabulary, and examples of differing usage of things like, say, serial commas. The hardest part for me is reading outside my genre, particularly book-length nonfiction, which I never seem to get to. Even so, varied reading has a magical way of bringing me words and even oddball spellings I need for my translations. As an example: a historical detective novel translated from the French told me that an architectural word I doubted was just the thing for my translation, too.

Know Your Taste & Know Publishers’ Tastes. I love all that reading because, well, I love to read, get a kick out of the serendipitous words tossed at me while I walk on the treadmill, and find that every book I read gives me a chance to know who’s publishing what, in Russian and in English. That last point is important because each book tells me more about preferences, both my own and publishers’; it doesn’t take too many books to find patterns. All those preferences are important because if you’re going to pitch a book to a publisher, you want to know why you like it, what you think the author does well, why you think the publisher would like it, and why the book would fit the publisher’s list. All that reading also gives a sense of global trends, context that can be very helpful when you pitch books.

Don’t Forget You’re a Writer. A lot of people outside translation don’t seem to know this but translators are writers. (We can even join the Author’s Guild, something I recommend highly.) Reading is also invaluable for observing and learning from tics and flourishes in other writers’ work… this is ridiculously helpful when you’re translating, say, a novel where there are lots of shifts in verb tense. (Can you tell I’m watching for that right now?) Back in the days when I wanted to write my own fiction, I took a few two-hour writing workshops and even attended the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference. Twice. Lots of the advice—like limiting most dialogue tags to a simple “s/he said”—has served me very well as a translator and it’s been fun to run into a couple of my writer-teachers at book events. One of my favorite pieces of writing advice, though, came to me from Richard Rhodes’s How to Write. Rhodes says that when he asked Conrad Knickerbocker, public relations manager at Hallmark, how to become a writer, Knickerbocker said, “Rhodes, you apply ass to chair.” It’s the same for translators. Standing desks are fine (I used to use one) but writing is still a lot of work.

Be a Member of the Book Community. Join the American Literary Translators Association and/or the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and attend conferences. Go to readings and signings at local bookstores, libraries, or universities. Go to book fairs and chat with publishers, agents, and other writers. Bonus reason to buy more books as you do all that: you’re supporting our industry. Keep things light as you get to know your colleagues. Getting into this business takes time so there’s no need to rush. Don’t forget your local library, either. My small local library’s collection and Maine’s interlibrary loan system have saved me on many occasions, often (I confess) just before deadlines. Libraries are also a great place for programs about countries, books, and professions like translation, so do offer to speak.

Love What You Do. I only translate books that I love in some way: I want a book to engage me emotionally (I’ve had to end a few workdays because I was sobbing over my translations), intellectually, and linguistically. If a book doesn’t do all that for you, it can still be pretty enjoyable if it teaches you a lot. Example: I didn’t feel a deep emotional connection to the article-length texts about art and artists that I translated for a museum book, but I sure did enjoy learning about the art and the artists. I think I love what I do most when I read through a draft (third? fourth? it varies…) that makes me realize my translation is coming together into a book, a real book that real people can read. Getting to that point involves months of agonizing decisions over words, cursing my own lack of knowledge of arcane subjects (this happens a lot), and long, long hours of, yes, applying ass to chair. I couldn’t put in all that time agonizing, cursing myself, and sitting on my butt if I didn’t love the work, meaning if I didn’t love the fact that all that agonizing, cursing myself, and sitting on my butt help me make those books. I suppose that probably means I love the agony, cursing, and sitting, too, doesn’t it?

I hope that those of you reading this who hope to become literary translators find the same satisfaction of agonizing over words, cursing yourselves, and sitting on your butts for days on end as you find your own way into the profession.

Up Next. Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhak), which I’ve finished. And more Big Book reading: Shamil Idiatullin’s Brezhnev City, which I’ve resumed reading and which now seems to have caught me, too, despite its slow pace, and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Mysterious Year.

Interviews With Translators

Since this blog serves as my online filing system (surprise!) and since I happened to read two interviews with Russian-to-English translators last week, I thought I’d devote a post (meaning this post) to them: translator interviews aren’t exactly uncommon but these two covered points I especially enjoy reading about. The death last week of Gregory Rabassa, who translated from the Spanish and Portuguese, reminded me of an interview with him that I especially enjoyed reading, too.

First off, from a brief Q&A on the Pushkin Press site, here’s the beginning of Robert Chandler’s answer the question “What does being a translator mean to you?”:

I was once introduced to an acclaimed French translator of Shakespeare.  I was taken aback by my own entirely unexpected reaction: I felt envious of him.  He could get close to Shakespeare in a way that I can’t.

The more I think about what Robert says, the more moving I find his answer and the more I envy that French translator, too! The closeness of which Robert speaks is one of my favorite parts of translating. There’s a technical closeness with the text that can result in remembering specific words and usage from specific books, and even where tricky passages are located on their pages, and then there’s an emotional side, too: some books make me cry on each and every draft because I feel the stories so deeply on every each and draft. I learned a lot about thoroughness and collaboration from working with Robert on a Platonov story, and it was a joy to observe and sense his closeness with Platonov.

When asked to recommend just one book from Russian literature, Robert began his answer with this:

Andrey Platonov, ‘The Return’: This short story about an army captain returning home to his family in 1946 is one of the wisest works of literature I know.  It is also both tender and funny.

“The Return” (“Возвращение”), which I’ve written about in the past (here) is a beautiful story that I love recommending to anybody and everybody. It’s in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and it’s in Soul, in Robert’s translation. I’ll also mention that it makes me happy that Robert cites 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, which Boris Dralyuk is editing for Pushkin Press; I translated a short story by Mikhail Prishvin for the book. I can’t wait to see 1917 toward the end of the year.

Liesl Schillinger’s interview with Jamey Gambrell, on the Los Angeles Review of Books site, could keep me writing posts for an entire month! I have tremendous respect for Gambrell’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (previous post), which I should keep on my desk at all times: just opening Day to any random page is instant inspiration because a) I know this book had to be difficult to translate, b) Gambrell makes it look like this painstaking work was easy to do, and c) I can tell she had fun. Translation is painstaking fun.

I enjoyed the whole interview and—among other things—am glad to see that Gambrell thinks there’s been an upturn in the publishing of literary translations in recent years. (I share her belief so if I’m delusional, at least I’m not alone in my delusions!) Still, it’s Gambrell’s answers about process that felt closest. Nearly a dozen drafts sounds like a lot until I start thinking about how many times I go through my manuscripts, on the screen and on paper (they sure pile up fast…). Probably what I identify with most, though, in terms of process—this is something that has amazed me ever since it was part of my life as a freelance writer, too—is how the work seems to require hours of agonizing thinking about difficult passages but then resolutions seem to appear by magic. Meaning: out of thin air, despite the hours of agonizing thinking. After mentioning a specific passage from a Tolstaya story that’s filled with quotations from Pushkin, nursery rhymes, and all manner of other references, Gambrell says:

I must have spent three weeks on these three or four pages alone. I went back to it again and again. Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and say, “That’s how I want to do it!” In that sense, I think that’s where being a translator and a writer overlap; when you are working on a piece like that, it sits in your head and simmers, and there is a process going on even if you are not aware of it. You will be in the middle of something, talking to someone, and you’ll suddenly break off and go, “Oh! That’s the word!” It is so wonderful when that happens — so rewarding.

This is one of the best feelings in the world. The shower seems to be where I make my biggest “policy” decisions about translations and cooking seemed to dredge up vocabulary insights and associations. The hows and whys of what goes on in my head are mysteries I don’t think I want to solve. Ever.

Finally, Gregory Rabassa’s death last week reminded me of Susan Bernofsky’s 2013 interview with Rabassa for The Rumpus. I read the interview when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and it’s stuck with me because, I suspect, of the liveliness of the conversation, the mention of similarities between translation and acting, and Rabassa’s multiple uses of the word “fun.”

Disclaimers: The usual, plus I’m feeling a bit lazy and sleepy after a beach outing this afternoon.

Up Next: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which I’m still mulling over, trying to figure out how to write about it without giving away the whole story; Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I am now officially calling Faith; Maria Galina’s ever-mysterious Autochthons; and Aleksei Ivanov’s Nasty Weather/Nenast’e, which went to the beach with me this afternoon.