ASEEES: My Happy Boston Slavist Convention Travel (Late Again!)

I’ve already established in multiple “Up Next” notes that last December’s Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference convention was “ridiculously fun,” which was probably a dangerous thing to write since I’m no David Lodge. Nothing wacky happened (I didn’t shop at the hotel convenience store) and I left for home before the Saturday night dance party started, though I saw a tweet about it on the bus ride from Boston. “Bus ride” hardly sounds like a synonym for “fun times” either but, well, the two-hour trip did not induce jetlag. Then again, there’s something to be said for the nervous energy that comes with a transatlantic plane flight. (Hello, London Book Fair!) In any case, ASEEES was particularly fun because, with thousands of Slavists in attendance I saw colleagues – both in pre-arranged and chance meetings – from all stages of my Russian studies life, from grad school decades ago to my Moscow years and my current incarnation as a translator. There’s something oddly comforting about that: things change, things stay the same, things are enjoyable. As even convention panels sometimes are, too. I’ll start with highlights of Russian literature panels.

• The first panel I attended was on the legacy of Vladimir Makanin, where I took particular interest in hearing Byron Lindsey, who has translated Makanin (here’s a story), speak about knowing him, Vladimir Ivantsov speak about teaching him, and Irina Anisimova speak about Makanin’s Asan – I share Anisimova’s views of the narrative’s shortcomings and dead-end/failed plotlines. Since I was the only spectator at this panel (I’d heard this often happens at ASEEES), it was nice to join in the conversation after the papers.
• A panel called “The Poetics of Space in Post-Soviet Fiction,” chaired by Sibelan Forrester, covered some familiar territory, too. I was sorry to miss Sofya Khagi speaking about Pelevin, Bykov, and Ilichevsky, but glad to catch Keith Livers’s paper on Alexander Prokhanov’s The Murder of Cities if only because I seem to recall someone thanking Livers for reading Prokhanov so others don’t have to. I’ve never read Prokhanov but after scribbling “signature motif of dismemberment,” in quotation marks, hmm, perhaps I should be thankful, too. Given my own reading and translation work, Muireann Maguire’s paper on Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During and Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator felt, of course, the most familiar and relevant – I loved hearing her speak about elements of clinical confinement, transitional spaces, and historiography. (I’d go on but don’t want to give away The Aviator’s big spoiler!)
• I heard more discussion of contemporary fiction in a panel called “Russia’s History as Battlefield: Ideology, Politics, and the Response of Literature,” chaired by Dirk Uffelmann and with discussant Boris Noordenbos, who (according to my marginalia) studies conspiracy theories. Stehn Aztlan Mortensen spoke about Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria, seeing Sorokin as a sort of modern-day Gogol, and Kåre Johan Mjør spoke about contemporary conservative thought, but it was Ingunn Lunde’s discussion of “reimaginations of historical pasts” that particularly hit me because she analyzed many aspects of Mikhail Gigolashvili’s mammoth Mysterious Year, about Ivan the Terrible, covering its structure (one chapter, one day), stylized prose (e.g. mix of high-brow and oral usage), and themes that resonate today, such as Russia and the West, and spiritual and moral values.
• Saturday got off to a great start with “Great Performances of Glasnost”: Breakthrough Events in Soviet-Western Literary Relations in the 80s and 90s, where I was sorry to miss Ellen Chances’s paper but very much enjoyed Carol Ueland’s on “The Arrival of New Soviet Writers, the PEN Readers of 1987, and Joseph Brodsky”; Nadezhda Azhghikina’s reading of (the absent) Natalia Ivanova’s piece about a 1991 conference of Russian women writers and American Slavists; and then discussant Nancy Condee’s wonderfully freewheeling talk about personal experiences living in Moscow during the Soviet period. There was tons to soak up here, particularly the combination of official delegations and personal experiences, all of which brought back lots of perestroika-era memories of visitors to my university, including Anatoly Rybakov, who spoke at my department at a time when, sadly, I hadn’t a clue who he was.

(I realize I’ve established a disgraceful-sounding pattern of missed papers: this is largely because it was difficult to ride the escalator or walk the corridors of the hotel’s conference area – where some conferees conventioneers pretty much set up remote offices in comfortable-looking chairs – without running into anyone familiar that I hadn’t seen in the last hour or thirty years. This was conference culture at its finest.)

• And then there were the split sessions, where I heard most of Eliot Borenstein’s “‘No, You’re the Puppet’: Conspiracy and Agency in the Putin Era,” which was part of a panel on conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia and which I couldn’t resist for its discussion of the zombification of consumers of mass media, the passive behavior that results, and the dovetailing with conspiracy theory. Of course my notes on the paper may be garbled since I quickly started thinking more about (damn it!) mobile rabies, free will, race baiting, and the masses in Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island (previous post), a book that, yes, ladies and gentlemen, still pokes at my addled brain cells. In any case, I’m already looking forward to Eliot’s Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism, which you can preview here (scroll down for the beginning!). I also highly recommend Eliot’s “Rereading Akunin” blog posts. Along the way to a theater panel, I resisted the call of Stephen F. Cohen’s familiar voice from a roundtable on “What Did the Soviet Dissident Movement Teach the Field: In Honor of Edward Kline and Valery Chalidze” in favor of arriving in time for Aleksei Semenenko’s paper on Othello.
• The final session I attended, also only in part since I was late-late-late once again, this time thanks to goodbyes, was a roundtable, “Introducing Alternative Perspectives: Women’s Writing in Post-Soviet Russia and Former Socialist Republics,” that included discussion of Nastya Rybka (I think?) and Alisa Ganieva (definitely); chaired by Alisa Rowley, with participants Olga Breininger-Umetayeva, Vasilina Orlova, Aleksandra Simonova, and Susanna Weygandt. I enjoyed hearing their perspectives on feminism, women, and writing, and am very sorry to have missed the beginning.
• My own paper, in a translation stream session about criticism chaired by Emily Finer, discussed online criticism of Russian-to-English translations. I focused on (and offered examples of) approaches that address elements of a translation without nitpicking about individual word choices but manage to find ways to express, in a balanced way, the reviewer’s preferences for a different approach – these sorts of reviews can be wonderfully tactful, constructive, and useful. My co-panelists were Timothy Sergay, with “Can Rejection of ‘Gotcha’ Criticism Be Reconciled with Interlinguistic Scrutiny?: Notes of a Rueful Reviewer of Translations,” and Hannu Kemppanen, whose paper “The Place of Translation in the Target Culture: Book Reviews as an Institution of Translation” (here’s another version of Hannu’s paper) offered a case study of a work of nonfiction by Yuri Komissarov (Deryabin in real life – the author was a Soviet diplomat) that was translated into Finnish and received fifty (!) reviews. Our discussant didn’t come so I somehow made it through my first academic conference without being discussanted. Maybe I’ll experience that dubious pleasure in 2020 in Washington.

I came home before the last day of the convention – I just couldn’t envision such an early Sunday morning – and wound up my ASEEES stay with a Russo-American Poetry Reading session, where highlights included readings by Polina Barskova, Matvei Yankelevich, and Pavel Arseniev. And then I headed off for the bus, towing a little suitcase half-filled with A History of Russian Literature by Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler; and with smaller spaces taken up by Anna Burns’s Milkman, a wonderful colleague’s gift that I loved reading on the treadmill, a little at a time, feeling the rhythms of the skaz narration as I walked; as well as Linor Goralik’s Found Life, a collection of poems, stories, comics, and a play edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokour that I’m planning to read chunks of soon alongside a Russian volume with very similar contents.

Up Next: Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped. And then something else.

Disclaimers: The usual, plus I’ve known Eliot Borenstein since my Moscow years. Thank you to Columbia University Press’s Russian Library – who will be publishing my translation of Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog later this year! – for the copy of the Goralik book. Oxford University Press gave me a generous and much-appreciated discount on A History of Russian Literature.

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…

Trip Report: Peaks Island. In Praise of Close-to-Home Travel. A List of Russia’s Open Book Books.

I generally only write reports about big trips with overnight stays—New York for BookExpo America, other American cities for American Literary Translators Association conferences, Moscow for translator congresses…—but a recent three-hour trip to Peaks Island, where I helped host a screening of the documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin at the Peaks Island branch of the Portland Public Library, made for an enjoyable evening. It also brought some realizations about how important it is to get out and tell the public about Russian literature and literary translation.

First, a bit of background, presented rather inelegantly, to save space… “Russia Resurgent” was the topic for this year’s Camden Conference, fwhich is held annually in Camden, Maine, a couple hours up the coast from where I live. Though a three-day conference in Camden is the centerpiece, there’s also a huge multi-month schedule of community events around the state. I was involved with three: I read excerpts from some of my translations at libraries in Scarborough and Kennebunk (a third event, in Brunswick, was cancelled because of bad weather), and helped host a screening of Russia’s Open Book at the Scarborough Public Library, attended by the film’s co-directors, Sarah Willis and Paul Mitchell. Though the Peaks Island trip wasn’t part of the Camden Conference schedule, it came out of the Scarborough screening.

Every event was fun. I love reading from my translations—these readings included excerpts from works by Margarita Khemlin, Vladislav Otroshenko, Eugene Vodolazkin, and Marina Stepnova—and the audiences in Scarborough and Kennebunk were wonderful. People asked questions about everything from how I got started in translation to how I work and how I know my translations are correct. It’s a big plus that public readings can be a great way to gauge your success in conveying humor. And people ask where and how they can find and buy the translated books.

The two screenings of Russia’s Open Book took a little less energy—reading for an hour is tiring even when Q&A is interspersed!—but were at least as rewarding. People engage well with the film’s excerpts from four novels, which are read by Stephen Fry and accompanied by animation. There’s context-setting talk with Russian critics. The ending, with Vladimir Sorokin’s comments about the future, chills my spine (and yes, I mean that literally) every time, even though I know what’s coming. And an hour is perfect to present detail about six writers without putting anyone to sleep. Lots of questions come up: do Russian writers often create parallel universes, do these writers make a living from their fiction, what’s the situation for Russian bookstores. And people ask where and how they can find and buy the translated books.

The audience at the Peaks Island screening even asked if I could create a list of books in English translation by the six writers in Russia’s Open Book. I can. And it’s below. I didn’t see much of Peaks Island during the three hours I was there (particularly since it was dark when I left) but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the couple dozen people who came to the library on a cold and very windy night. Meeting them—and the people who came to my events in Scarborough and Kennebunk—feels like a perfect antidote to complaints that translators (and even translated literature) are invisible and go unrecognized. People do care about translation, readers are interested in Russian fiction in translation, and I’m glad so many translators make the effort to read from and speak about their work in their communities. The more I get out, the more I realize how important that is.

Without further ado, here’s the list I promised to the Peaks Island audience. Perhaps it will be helpful to other libraries and institutions that screen the film. And please do let me know if I missed anything! Two notes. First, five of the six writers in the film have books available in English translation; Mariam Petrosyan is the exception. Second, I’ve linked each writer’s name to the bios I wrote for the Read Russia site, in preparation for BookExpo America 2012. The publication and awards lists there aren’t all up-to-date, but the bios still provide a fair bit of background on the writers as well as lists of some of the writers’ short fiction available in translation. And a third note: my “previous post” posts are written about the Russian originals, not the translations.

Zakhar Prilepin 

• Sankya (Disquiet International/Dzanc Books, 2014, tr. Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker with Alina Ryabovolova. This book makes great use of glossaries.) (previous post)
• Sin (Glagoslav, 2012, tr. Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas) (previous post)

Ludmila Ulitskaya 

• The Big Green Tent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, tr. Bela Shayevich)
• Daniel Stein, Interpreter (The Overlook Press, 2011, tr. Arch Tait) (previous post)
• Sonechka (Schocken, 2005, tr. Arch Tait), novella and stories
• Medea and Her Children (Schocken, 2002, tr. Arch Tait)
• The Funeral Party: A Novel (Schocken, 2001, tr. Cathy Porter, edited by Arch Tait)

Dmitry Bykov

• Living Souls (Alma Books, 2011, tr. Cathy Porter) (previous post)

Anna Starobinets

• Catlantis (Pushkin Children’s Books, fall 2015, tr. Jane Bugaeva). Cat humor, romance, and adventure for children nine and up, plus cat lovers of all ages… more soon on Catlantis.
• The Icarus Gland (Skyscraper Publications, 2014, tr. James Rann). Short stories.
• The Living (Hesperus, 2012, tr. James Rann)
• An Awkward Age (Hesperus, 2011, tr. Hugh Aplin). Short fiction. (previous post)

Vladimir Sorokin

• The Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, late 2015, tr. Jamey Gambrell), (previous post)
• Day of the Oprichnik (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, tr. Jamey Gambrell) (previous post). My favorite Sorokin book.
• The Ice Trilogy (New York Review Books, 2011, tr. Jamey Gambrell) (previous posts: first book and second book)
• The Queue (New York Review Books, 2008, tr. Sally Laird, first published in English in 1988 by Readers International Inc.). I’ve heard lots of great things about this book over the years… I’ve been saving The Queue for a cranky day!

You can screen Russia's Open Book, too, here or through Intelligent Channel's YouTube channel.

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual and much more, for my work with Read Russia, talks with Sarah and Paul about the film…

Up next: Eugene Vodolzakin’s Solovyov and Larionov and Lena Eltang’s Cartagena, a complex murder mystery of sorts that I’m still reading slowly to appreciate all the details. Plus maybe a novella or two… 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!

Photo: Econrad, creative commons, via Wikipedia

Moscow Trip Report, November-December Snowstorm Edition

It was, put mildly, a supremely pleasant surprise to spend last week in Moscow: how could I refuse an invitation from the Institute of Translation to spend three days in workshops on publishing and translation, plus excursions to the Non/fiction book fair? I added a few days to the beginning and end of my trip so I could see friends, go the Big Book award ceremony, and buy books, making for perfect business-with-pleasure travel. A few highlights:

Big Book. A huge thank you to Georgy Urushadze, Big Book’s general director, for putting me on the list for the Big Book evening: it was great fun to attend my first Russian book award ceremony and see friends and colleagues at the event. Though I was a little surprised that Daniil Granin won two awards—the top prize from the jury for My Lieutenant plus a special award for honor/merit/virtue—Georgy explained to me the next afternoon that special awards are determined long before the ceremony but votes from the jury (a.k.a. a “literary academy” of around 100 people) are tallied just before the ceremony. I’ve read so little of Granin that I have no opinion about his awards… but I was very happy to see Marina Stepnova win third prize from readers and the jury—her Lazar’s Women feels like a “big” book to me—and for Maria Galina to win second prize from readers for her engaging Mole Crickets. I still have a bunch of this year’s finalists on the shelf, including Granin’s book and Valery Popov’s To Dance to Death. For a fun bit of reportage from Big Book, take a look at this video concerning “Кто убил русскую литературу?” (“Who Killed Russian Literature”)—the reporter, one Oleg Koronnyi, seemed always to be standing in front of me when I was sitting so I’m relieved to learn he was working on something important. A Big Book bonus: the винегрет/beet salad was a great snack.

The Workshops. I must admit I was a bit puzzled when the Institute invited me to Moscow for three days of workshops and book fair visits: I’m so used to having specific tasks when I travel, e.g. “give a talk/reading” or “write ten brief articles about this conference,” that I couldn’t believe my only formal responsibility was to contribute in roundtable discussions about publishing Russian literature in translation. I confess I’m sometimes a rather slow study so it took me a couple days to figure out this was a very good thing indeed. I know it sounds painfully cheesy (or like I’m sucking up to someone, something I have absolutely no existential or other need to do!) but all the interaction, learning, and contributions began to feel effortless, thanks to a casual atmosphere and a fantastic international group of publishers, translators, literary agents, and others with a professional interest in Russian literature. A few examples from the group: Ola Wallin, a Swedish publisher (Ersatz) and translator who brings a diverse selection of Russian fiction, from Andrei Platonov to Dmitrii Glukhovskii, to diverse Swedish readers… Christine Mestre, who’s president of the Prix Russophonie and founded Les Journées du Livre Russe festival, and makes me think Paris in February sounds like the very best of ideas… Margherita Crepax, who translates into Italian and won the Premio Gorky for her translation of Sasha Sokolov’s School for Fools; Margherita told how two of her translations—Tolstaya’s The Slynx and Platonov’s Dzhan—were commissioned but never published… I could go on and on and on but will just add that the only bad development was the weather: I love a multiple-day storm with lots of snow, drizzle, sleet, and related precipitation, but "our" storm created horribly slippery sidewalks that caused falls and even a bunch of broken bones. Ouch!

Non/fiction with drizzle.

Non/fiction. I’m relieved that the Non/fiction book fair didn’t let me down! I’d been wanting to go for several years and was glad it lived up to its reputation for fun and usefulness: no wonder people will wait in the cold, wet snow for tickets. For someone like me who doesn’t go to book fairs to buy or sell rights, it’s difficult to describe the difference between Non/fiction and the Moscow International Book Fair, which I visited in September. Many (or at least some!) of the exhibitors were the same—from big houses like Eksmo and AST to the small railroad publisher I chatted with about vocabulary in September—but Non/fiction calls itself, rightly, an intellectual book fair and creates a far cozier atmosphere for discussion thanks to its location in the Central House of Artists instead of a pavilion in what used to be the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. Potentially relevant bonus: The coffee vendors were better placed! Non/fiction was a great chance to see friends, colleagues, and books, many of which were, yes, works of fiction.

Things I carried home:
books...  plus German throat lozenges  I wish 
I could buy in the U.S. and a ticket to Non/fiction

Book Acquisitions. I didn’t bring home as many books as I did in September, largely because I caught a bit of a cold and didn’t have enough energy and curiosity for rigorous book shopping. I still managed to bring back a nice little stack of books, though, including Oleg Ermakov’s The Arithmetic of War, which many people have recommended, Maya Kucherksaya’s The God of Rain, Mark Kharitonov’s To See More (after talking with Margherita Crepax, who’s translated Kharitonov, I felt guilty about never having read him!), Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Brother Laurus (literally Laurel), and Anton Utkin’s The Road into Snowfall (?), a title that felt weather-appropriate. Marina Aromshtam, a friend of two friends, very kindly gave me copies of two of her books, including When Angels Rest, a finalist for the “youth” category of this year’s Yasnaya Polyana award. A bonus: when I gave Natasha Perova of Glas a copy of Everything Matters!, by Maine writer Ron Currie, Jr., in exchange she gave me Still Waters Run Deep: Young Women’s Writing from Russia, which contains translations by several of you. I’m looking forward to reading your work!

Finally… I had another lovely visit with Vladislav Otroshenko and am pleased to say that my translation of his “Языки Нимродовой башни” (“The Languages of Nimrod’s Tower”) will be published in Subtropics, in January… My airplane reading included the December issue of Snob, which I bought at the airport to spend my last rubles. Snob feels considerably less snobby now than last year when I had a trial subscription, and it was fun to open it up somewhere between Moscow and Zurich and find Stas Zhitskii’s piece listing three books about cities, including Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City, which I liked so much; the other two books, BTW, were Maks Frai’s Stories of Old Vilnius and Alexander Ilichevsky’s City of Sunset, about Jerusalem… A dictionary of fashionable words was good company on the Zurich-to-Boston flight, even if I have my doubts that a word I’ve been using for about two decades—облом/oblom—can qualify as fashionable for a book about language in the twenty-first century. Maybe I’m just way ahead of my time?...

Disclaimers. A big thank you to the Institute of Translation, with which I collaborate directly and indirectly through Read Russia!, for bringing me back to Moscow, to Georgy Urushadze for inviting me (at my request) to Big Book, and to many, many friends and colleagues for tea, time, and advice.

Up Next. Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad (I realize this probably feels like Waiting for Godot by now…), Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator, and then maybe Granin’s Lieutenant or Popov’s To Dance to Death, which I’m especially curious about after hearing many good comments… Now that I seem to be back and settled in for the winter, I’m hoping to finally (finally!) get back to my usual reading and writing pace!