Please join us for a reading, author talk, and translator + author conversation! This is a rare opportunity to see both author and translator live and in person and in once place. Thank you to Tomorrow Bookstore for hosting this event and to Razom for Ukraine for sponsoring Olena’s US book tour.
Please join us for a reading, author talk, and translator + author conversation! Thank you to Second Flight Books for hosting Olena and to Razom for Ukraine for sponsoring Olena’s US book tour.
In 2020, I asked Ksenia Buksha if she had any new shorter work and she took the extraordinary step of writing “Управдом Даниил” — “Daniel the Super” in my translation — in response. Part prose poem, part dramatic monologue, part horror movie, Buksha’s thought experiment on the nature of responsibility vs helplessness is itself a prophetic warning…
no, it’s all good, though
the human race has always lived like this
the end of the world’s just business as usual
Thanks to Sarah Clark at ANMLY for her gracious and perceptive editing. Enjoy! (If “Enjoy!” is the proper exhortation for reading a piece that ends with a severed head…)
Many thanks to Heidi Winters Vogel, Assistant Professor of Theater at Wabash College, for directing a staged reading via Zoom of Julia Lukshina’s one-act play Everybody Be Nice in my translation!
Please join us on Saturday, October 30th, at 2 pm Eastern time to see these wonderful actors perform this moving and hilarious piece (contact me, Annie Fisher, for the Zoom link):
• Anya Filatova, 35 years old: MYRIAM AZIZ
• Roma Filatov, Anya’s husband, 33 years old: JAMES SAVAGE
• “Owlet” Filatova, their first-grade daughter, 6 years old: TBA
• Nadya Ovsyannikova, the chair of the Parents Committee and Anya’s best friend, 38 years old: KELLI CRUMP
• “The Abuser” (Nadya’s husband), 40 years old: DAVID VOGEL
• Lev Borisovich Zaichuk, PE teacher, 67 years old: CHARLES DUMAS
• Ilyusha Belenky, Owlet’s classmate and Zaichuk’s grandson, 6 years old: TBA
• Raisa Ivanovna, Owlet’s teacher; an early childhood education specialist and Distinguished Teacher of the Russian Federation, 54 years old: JULIE DIXON
• Children playing the part of Frogs in the Mother’s Day play, approximately 6 years old: TBA
• Stage Directions read by ANNE O. FISHER
The show runs around 60 minutes. Since the purpose of this staged reading is to workshop the translation, audience members are encouraged to stick around after the reading for a talk with the author, translator, director, and actors.
If you’d like a taste of the play, check out some of Anya’s monologues (also in my translation), published in Another Chicago Magazine.
The Russian original had a staged reading in Moscow at the Lyubimovka Young Playwrights Festival in 2019. Watch that reading here, watch the post-show discussion here, and read Julia’s thoughts about the discussion here (all in Russian). If you’d like to read the original Russian, it was published in Sovremennaya dramaturgiya #1, 2020; the text is also available on Julia’s website here.
Heidi Winters Vogel’s bio: Heidi Winters Vogel is a director, improv storytelling performer and Theater faculty at Wabash College in Indiana. Virtual productions: international collaboration of The Romeo and Juliet Project, director (Organizational Theatre), The Race, director (Wabash College) CLUE, director (Crossroads Repertory Theatre) and performer of Playback Theatre for global audiences. Pre-COVID, Heidi directed professionally for Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Next Stage, Avalon Theatre Company and Unreal City, among others.
Thanks to Neil Blackadder, Translations Editor at Another Chicago Magazine, for selecting these excerpts from Julia Lukshina’s play “Everybody Be Nice”! In these scenes we hear from Anya, the main character, a modern Moscow mother who is slowly drifting away from her husband as she attempts to break through as a writer, meet the demands of motherhood, and rein in her increasing reliance on airplane bottles of liquor snuck throughout the day. In short, Anya is trying (and, in her own view, failing) to figure out what it means to be a grown-up. Her only refuge from the ever-increasing stress is a social media group for women, called Everybody Be Nice.
Richard Coombes and I had a wonderful conversation with writer Andrey Filimonov. Richard and I are not cotranslators, but we are united by a mutual affinity for Andrey’s prose. Richard has translated a sample of Andrey’s second-to-last novel World Creation Recipes (“Рецепты сотворения мира”, published by Elena Shubina’s Publishers, 2018), while I have translated a sample of Andrey’s third-to-last novel Manikin and the Saints (“Головастик и святые”, published by Ripol-Klassik, 2016). Thanks go to B O D Y Magazine for publishing this colorful, playful, and at times surprising interview!
Derek and I gave a joint keynote address to the 2021 GLCA conference Translating (and) World Literature across the University hosted by DePauw University this April. Many thanks to organizers Paul Johnson and Angela Flury for inviting us to be part of the conversation and talk translation turkey with like-minded educators from all over the world. The keynote handout is available on the website for anyone interested in heightening translation’s visibility in their own classrooms and communities.
Julia’s “Grandpa” was one of the first of her stories I ever translated. Its quiet surface hides turmoil in the depths. I realized I was hooked on Julia’s writing when I found myself staring at the wall trying to decide how best to render the “ну” in “ну и так далее” given the way the character Anna Ivanovna speaks and behaves in the story. (Reader, I ended up going with “She sighed and said, ‘And so on.’”). I should add that although I’m not fond of many of Grandpa’s qualities, I do wish I was as spry in the knees as he is…
Then Grandpa walked in. Tall—he just cleared the lintel—and smiling, undoubtedly well over seventy, but quite strong. He was holding a prickly plaid lap blanket. He handed it to me and stepped over to the stove.
“So then, girls, getting colder?”
He squatted before the stove, opened the stove door, and dug around inside it with a poker. He shut the door. He stood up. Easily, like a forty-year-old.
Cover art: “Buckshot, 2020” by Alvin Armstrong
Julia’s short story “Water” was so much fun to translate. Meet philologist Yelena Dmitriyevna and her informant Baba Nyura:
“A rooster interrupted Yelena Dmitriyevna’s thoughts. The tatters of morning fog in the courtyard turned into a delicate veil suspended in the air. The rooster was sauntering along the fence, yelling his head off. Baba Nyura was sitting on the packed- earth bench along the side of the hut, her face turned to the sun. Parched wrinkles enveloped her watering eyes.
If there was no hotel in the village, and there almost never was, the village administration would send the visiting philologists to live with locals. Yelena Dmitriyevna always asked to be placed with an informant. That’s how she’d ended up with Baba Nyura.
Baba Nyura was eighty- seven. Like many old village women, she did all the weeding, digging, and wood- chopping herself. Her daughter Olga lived in Vologda, but, as they said when they talked about her in Teryayevo, she was a “flutter-by,” always running off somewhere, after some new job or new suitor. She hadn’t been to see her mother for seven years now. True, she did send money sometimes. Nyura had told her all this one evening after a shot of moonshine.”
It was a real pleasure working with Operations Director Miracle Jones and Editor-in-Chief Rachel Lyon, whose editing was simply beautiful. Thank you both!
Thrilled to share the news that our collection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s nonfiction, Countries That Don’t Exist, is forthcoming in the CUP Russian Library in September 2021! My contribution is The Poetics of Titles (Поэтика заглавий), the only book Krzhizhanovsky published in his lifetime. It is no coincidence that this occurred in 1931, the year when, according to Yury Olesha, “[Russian] literature ended.” It was just about a miracle that the slender volume made its way to publication. The pure joy and staggering erudition of this piece make it a sheer delight to read, and I hope this delight comes through in translation.
As if we needed more ways to prove that what GT does is not translation…
Thank you, B O D Y, for publishing this deceptively peaceful story by Julia Lukshina! As a child, the narrator stays awake to observe the mist shrouding the fields behind the dacha, a fascination which gradually coalesces into an inspiration (or an obsession). I enjoyed translating the subdued irony in this passage:
Once I was able to hold out for three nights in a row without sleep. By the end of the experiment, I felt light as a balloon, but on the fourth day I fell asleep while I was weeding the potato beds. My grandma discovered me in among the flattened plants and apparently thought I’d fainted. A sickly city child poisoned by fresh air. That’s the only thing that explains why I wasn’t punished. She warmed up my feet with a mustard plaster, for some reason, then swaddled me tight in her most prized possession—an Egyptian camel hair blanket—and sent me off to bed, ordering me not to get up until the next morning.
With Ksenia Buksha’s permission, I’ve posted my translation taster from Chapter 6 of Churov and Churbanov. It begins like this (click on it to read the whole sample):
The brief passage contains much of what I love about KB’s writing: the precise detail, the striking comparison, the power humming behind the restraint. KB sees the world absolutely differently, and allows/invites/compels us to do the same.
#WITMonth
(Make sure to read Meytal Radzinsky’s updated FAQ on Women In Translation Month, if you haven’t already!)
Thanks to Sarah Kapp and The Moscow Times for this very insightful review of The Freedom Factory, just in time for Women In Translation month! It’s a triple because it’s three women in one: a woman reviewing a woman’s translation of a book written by a woman. You could even tipple a tripel while you read this triple. :-)
Click to read Sarah Kapp’s perceptive review!
If you speak a Less Commonly Taught Language, come to the Virtual LCTL Career Fair this Friday, July 17, from 1:30 to 4:45 CDT hosted by the Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes (WISLI).
The Career Fair will connect speakers of less commonly taught languages with professional development and career opportunities in the public and private sectors. Attendance is free but you must pre-register.
I’m presenting at the “Private Sector” panel. Come listen to and network with our outstanding lineup of speakers!
The cover of the Russian original, Маннелиг в цепях.
Ilya Danishevsky. Photo by Arkady Kazantsev, 2020.
Alex Karsavin and I are grateful to the ERC-funded RusTrans Publish project for awarding funding to our co-translation of Ilya Danishevsky’s Mannelig in Chains. Read about Ilya Danishevsky and Mannelig (and the 11 other translation projects!) here, and meet all the translators here.
The RusTrans initiative is unlike anything I’ve seen before in its in its focus on understanding the processes influencing the production and reception of Russian literature in cultural context. Drs. Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer describe it thus (full text here):
The RusTrans project explores how national politics interacts with processes of translation (such as selection of texts, the institutionalization of translation as a profession, critical reception, and audience reactions) in the context of the reception of Russian translation in (primarily) English-speaking countries, during a discrete time period. We do not neglect traditional questions of textual fidelity, such as the impact of domesticating or foreignizing strategies, but we prioritise our analysis of how translation has been utilized to connect governments with audiences. The idea that translation confers cultural capital and that it may be consciously utilized (however paradoxically) as a means of reinforcing or even re-inventing national culture is not new [...]. And yet, no single school or group of scholars has previously isolated the phenomenon of translation as a factor in the formation of national identity as a topic for analysis; nor has this factor been studied in the overseas reception of a single culture over an extended period of time. Our project will remedy this gap in translation scholarship.
Here are the four RusTRANS case studies, of which the RusTrans Publish project is #4:
1. How translated Russian literature informed the Irish nationalist movement and Irish-language prose realism (Pushkin in Grafton Street)
2. How translated Russian classics enhanced the UK public’s receptivity to non-canonical, heavily politicized Russian fictions (David Magarshack and Penguin Books)
3. How translators’ and editors’ selections signalled American patriotism within the USA’s Russian émigré communities in the mid-twentieth century (The Unmaking of Russians)
4. Ideological conflicts in contemporary literary translation from Russian in the UK (Publishing Translations from Russian Today).
Alex Karsavin and I are thrilled that Ilya Danishevsky’s novel Mannelig in Chains was chosen to play a part in this important initiative. Very much looking forward to reading the results of all four case studies!
Very grateful to Lunch Ticket’s Editor in Chief, Loumarie I Rodriguez, for including Julia’s story “Dead Fox” in my translation in the Summer/Fall 2020 issue of Lunch Ticket! (And also for the sensitive editing!) Interestingly there is another story about foxes in the same issue, Kelly Gray’s “How To Skin a Fox,” which I found mesmerizing and incantatory.
Translating this story was surprisingly challenging: the narrative and dialogue seem straightforward, but the temporal and POV shifts + the stylistic precision and laconism were very demanding. I am not sure everyone will know to scroll past the Russian original to see my translator’s statement, so here it is again:
Julia’s precise, spare style is a joy for the translator. Due to her art and screenwriting background, she knows just how to wield the compact phrase and the expressive image. In “Dead Fox,” a story about family relationships, the wild fox’s impassive observations are matched by the human narrator’s dry commentary. Much is telegraphed by small details of behavior or the absence of those affectionate diminutive nicknames and word forms so characteristic of Russian. Conveying emotional overtones in prose as spare as Julia’s was a delightful challenge: on top of the fact that Russian to English prose translation tends to expand by at least 15%-20%, there is also the temptation to “get there the easy way” via explicitation instead of relying on detail and gesture. In cases like this, it’s very helpful to be close enough to the author, as I am to Julia, to be able to suggest words in a collaborative fashion; in this case, I was so delighted by the description of the little Maltese being sick in the car, so reminded of my own small dog’s unfortunately similar behavior, that I suggested adding the word “loaf” to make the image even more concrete. Julia and I also had long conversations about how much a fox would know about human words, objects, and relationships. I hope you enjoy reading Julia’s work as much as I enjoy translating it.
A huge thank-you to Michael Stein and Joshua Mensch for publishing Chapter One of Andrey Filimonov’s book Manikin and the Saints («Головастик и святые») in B O D Y Magazine!
Read it here.
As a translator, I rub my hands together gleefully whenever I sit down to work on Andrey Filimonov’s work. His language is compact and earthy, rich in puns and in local or dialect words with Slavic roots that send me down the research rabbit hole time and again. This first chapter is different from the rest of the book in that it’s a legend about the colonization of Siberia (the rest of the book is contemporary). To render it, not only did I need to track down Polish words, local ethnonyms, and words from medieval chronicles, I also worked to recreate its laconic, vivid style that, to my ear, gestures both to indigenous oral tradition and to a Russian pensioner telling stories at the dacha.
A note on the book’s title: the main character’s name is Головастик, which means “tadpole.” The word головастик does not, however, mean “manikin.” What gives?
My rendering of the nickname comes from the pun in Chapter 6 of the book in a scene giving our hero’s origin story. It’s a scene where Manikin and his wife have been demoted to the boonies, as a punishment; knowing the local villagers will automatically be suspicious of him as a representative of the powerful metropolis, he defuses the situation with a joke.
Как сошли мы с Кочерыжкой на берег, мужики сразу встретили коварным вопросом:
— Ну что, глава, причапал?
Почтительно сняв кепку, отвечал:
— Глава в городе, а я так — Головастик.
Им понравилось.
As soon as Cabbage Core and me stepped on shore, the menfolk pounced with this cunning question:
“So then, big man, you landed?”
I doffed my cap respectfully and said:
“The big man’s in the city. Me, I’m just a manikin.”
They liked that.
The Russian cover.
Russian writer Ksenia Buksha’s 2019 novel Churov and Churbanov [“Чуров и Чурбанов”] was just shortlisted for the 2020 Big Book Award! I listened to the novel as an audiobook (you can get Russian audiobooks legally and quite cheaply at Litres) and loved this quirky, moving, and keenly-observed story. It is so palpably grounded in St. Petersburg that the small but essential moment of magical realism that grounds the tale seems as real as the local bread factory’s industrial bread dough mixer that shakes the neighborhood every time it turns on. Stay tuned for a translation amuse-bouche!
