Lizok's Bookshelf

A Jumble: Two Books, One Coven, and Six Literary Award Finalists

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 12 May 2013 22:23:00 +0000

I took a break last week after a rather bloody incident involving a grater, a chunk of Pineland sharp cheddar cheese, and a middle finger. Now that I’m back to full typing capacity, despite an occasional twinge in the finger, here’s a jumble of a post to get me caught up…

I’ll admit that last week I was more than happy to procrastinate writing about Sergei Nosov’s Грачи улетели (The Rooks Have Flown/Left/Gone): in keeping with the jumble theme, The Rooks is a nearly indescribable jumble of characters, places, and motifs. Nosov tells the story of three old friends—a teacher, a typewriter repairman and watchman, and a former flyswatter salesman and would-be artist(e)—in three non-chronological sections. Much of the book is set in St. Petersburg, which lends itself to some nice passages about changing names and times. And references to Dostoevsky. And peeing off a bridge.

I thought The Rooks worked particularly well when Nosov examined contemporary art—one of his characters makes a wonderful trip to the Hermitage and stares in the abyss of Malevich’s glassed-in Black Square—and the fine lines between art and life. The section set in Germany, where the flyswatter salesman and would-be artist lives for a time and hosts the other two for a painful visit, felt less successful because it felt, simply, too long. Despite some structural misgivings, Nosov won me over with atmosphere, love for St. Petersburg, and a tone that avoids the cloying and preciousness thanks, in large part, to tart commentary on contemporary art and culture. The epilogue contains developments that brought varying degrees of surprise and showed how little we may know our friends and literary characters. It also cemented my interpretation of the book’s title as a reference to fall, playing off the name of Aleksei Savrasov’s painting of rooks that have returned in spring.

Iurii Trifonov’s Обмен (The Exchange) is a lovely jumble, too, a long story about family that blends past and present, private and public: Trifonov focuses on Viktor Dmitriev, whose wife Lena wants to arrange an apartment exchange so they (and their daughter) can live with Dmitriev’s mother, Ksenia, who is horribly ill. The description of The Exchange in Neil Cornwall and Nicole Christian’s Reference Guide to Russian Literature is so good and detailed (even if it’s cut off!) that I’ll just focus on impressions. I think what struck me most about The Exchange was the grayness of Dmitriev’s Soviet-era existence: his daily routine, his past affair with a co-worker he thinks would have made a better wife than Lena, and, of course, disappointment. Everything is beautifully observed and described though I find this sort of quiet—or perhaps muted and repressed?—desperation even sadder than the harsher chernukha of the post-Soviet era. I mean that as a statement of respect rather than a criticism. Particularly since I have to think there’s a reason Trifonov chose to include that cesspool.

Oxford from the air... must get up early enough to see city before coven...

On another note, I’m very excited about Translators’ Coven: Fresh Approaches to Literary Translation from Russian, a weekend workshop I’ll be attending at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, next month. I’ll be chairing a roundtable discussion about publishing and translations, and speaking on a panel about translating dialogue in drama. The week after the workshop, there will be a series of events about poetry translation at Pushkin House in London. A huge thank you to Oliver Ready and Robert Chandler for organizing all this. It’s a wonderful chance to learn and get caught up with London-based colleagues. I can’t wait!

Speaking of which… Pushkin House launched a new book award, the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, “to further public understanding of the Russian-speaking world, by encouraging and rewarding the very best non-fiction writing on Russia, and promoting serious discussion on the issues raised.” I’m always vowing (and, generally, failing) to read more (okay, any!) book-length nonfiction that complements my fiction reading, so the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize short list, which covers a wonderfully broad assortment of topics, is a convenient place to start looking for candidates:

Anne Applebaum: The Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Masha Gessen: Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Thane Gustafson: Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Fortune in Russia
Donald J. Raleigh: Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Post War Generation
Karl Schlögel: Moscow, 1937
Douglas Smith: Former People: The Last Days of Russia’s Aristocracy

FYI: Languagehat has posted about Soviet Baby Boomers and Moscow, 1937. Moscow, 1937 sounds particularly fun…

Reading Levels for Non-Native Readers of Russian: Medium for both the Nosov and Trifonov books.

Writer Names in Russian: Сергей Носов and Юрий Трифонов.

Up Next: A novella (or two?) by Victor Pelevin.

Image Credit: Oxford City Birdseye from SirMetal, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Big Book 2013 Long List

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:37:00 +0000

This year’s Big Book Award long list, which came out last week, looks like a good one: beyond the four books I’ve already read and enjoyed very much, there are a couple books I wish I’d bought in Moscow, plus a nice clump of titles I’m interested in. There are 36 books on the list, meaning it’s ~~a bit~~ way too long to include everybody here. But here are some notes:

Four books I’ve already read and loved, with English-language titles linking to previous posts:

Evgenii Vodolazkin: Лавр (Laurus). I’m appreciating the stark beauty of this book even more as I translate some excerpts. Already on the 2013 NatsBest short list.
Dmitrii Danilov: Описание города (Description of a City). I was excited to give a copy of this book to a friend recently—I’ll be happy if she likes it half as much as I did. (No pressure, C!)
Margarita Khemlin: Дознаватель (The Investigator). I still can’t believe how much action, emotion, and tension Khemlin packs into this book.
Ekaterina Sherga: Подземный корабль (The Underground Ship). A very deserving debut novel.

Three more books—in addition to 2013 NatsBest shortlister Laurus—have already won or been shortlisted for other major prizes:

Maxim Kantor: Красный свет (Red Light, though “свет” can also mean “world,” so I suspect dual meaning here). A novel with lots of twentieth-century history. NatsBest short list.
Aleksei Motorov: Юные годы медбрата Паровозова (Male Nurse Parovozov’s Young Years). Autobiographical fiction that won the readers’ prize in the 2013 NOSE award.
Aleksandr Terekhov: Немцы (Germans). Won the 2012 NatsBest. On the shelf for ages!

The two books I regret not buying when I was in Moscow… though only mildly because both are available online, in slightly condensed journal versions:

Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii: Музей революции (Museum of the Revolution).
Maia Kucherskaia: Тетя Мотя (Aunt Motya).

Books by writers I’ve read and enjoyed in the past:

Iurii Buida: Вор, шпион и убийца (Thief, Spy, and Murderer).
Alisa Ganieva: Праздничная гора (Holiday Mountain).
Aleksandr Ilichevskii: Город заката (City of Sunset).

In a column posted to Izvestiia after the short list came out, critic Liza Novikova noted four books of “documentary prose”:

Sergei Beliakov: Гумилев сын Гумилева (excerpts) (Gumilev, Son of Gumilev).
Valerii Esipov: Шаламов (Shalamov).
Iakov Gordin: Алексей Ермолов (Aleksei Ermolov).
Irina Rodnina: Cлеза чемпионки (The Champion’s Tear).

That’s only sixteen books… I’ve heard or read about several more, particularly Denis Gutsko’s Бета-самец (Beta-Male), Denis Dragunskii’s Архитектор и монах (maybe The Architect and the Monk), and Igor’ Sakhnovskii’s Oстрое чувство субботы (A Keen Feeling of Saturday: Eight First-Person Stories), but that still leaves nearly half the list.

A few other books are available online:

Elena Makarova: Фридл (Friedl, which a reader tells me is a diminutive for names such as Friedrich and Friederike... the character in the book is a woman but it doesn’t appear that her full name is in the text.). The online “title page” says this is a documentary novel, and the first page clearly shows a World War 2 setting.
Andrei Volos: Возвращение в Панчруд (excerpts) (Return to Panjrud). Volos, who is originally from Dushanbe, often writes about Central Asia. His agent’s site says this novel is about a poet in the Middle Ages.
Nikolai Klimontovich: Степанов и Князь (Stepanov and the Prince).
Anton Ponizovskii: Обращение в слух (For the Ears? I get the feeling of something intended to be heard…). The quick description from the publisher: a novel about Russia and the Russian soul. The book’s Web site doesn’t explain much more, though the journal intro says the novel includes actual interviews.

Disclaimers: The usual, for all sorts of commercial and collegial reasons.

Up Next: Sergei Nosov’s Грачи улетели (The Rooks Have Flown/Gone/Departed/Totally Left Town). One of you wrote and asked why I didn’t use “flown” in the translated title for this book… The Rooks Have Flown certainly sounds better than my versions! I think I was stuck because the title of the Savrasov painting referenced here is often translated as The Rooks Have Returned or The Rooks Have Come Back. I’m still figuring out how I think the title fits the book, which has something of a shock ending.

Plague and Apocalypse: Vodolazkin’s Laurus

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:46:00 +0000

Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Лавр (Laurus) combines lots of elements I enjoy in my fiction: a long-ago setting in the fifteenth century, guilt feelings, a focus on one ever-changing character, fear of apocalypse, curiously varied language, and, yes, even the bubonic plague. Best of all, to borrow from what one of you said about Laurus in an online conversation, the book is addictive. It just reads and reads and reads, drawing the reader through four “books,” sections that describe four stages—four separate lives, really—within the title character’s time(s) on earth, resulting in a simple structure that creates something akin to a life of a saint.

What’s a bit complicated for my purposes here is that the title character is known by several names, frequently Arseny, so I’ll call him that, too. So many thematic elements thread through Laurus that I think I’ll approach the book through a few themes I particularly enjoyed rather than trying to explain who’s who and what happens… the result is a messy mishmash, but pretty much anything would feel awkward to me because Laurus feels so elegantly balanced and indescribably intimate.

The Plague and the Apocalypse. Why do the bubonic plague and the apocalypse fascinate me in fiction? I don’t know but I suspect it’s because they infect novels with existentialism via the threat of imminent death. Aloneness fits with them, too: Laurus includes children orphaned because of the plague. (Even Forever Amber, BTW, endeared itself to me forever because of the plague, and I’m not alone!) In Laurus, Arseny learns herbal healing from his grandfather, Christopher, and treats plague patients in neighboring villages, earning such a reputation that he’s commandeered by a prince. As for apocalypse, there are calculations for the end of the world. Death is ubiquitous, particularly since Arseny often lives, basically, on top of cemeteries. Also: the unchristened dead are scapegoats for all sorts of calamities.

Time and Reinvention. One of the most wonderfully jarring aspects of Laurus is the language Vodolazkin uses. I feel almost as if I should write “languages” since Vodolazkin mixes archaisms with contemporary language—dropping in thoroughly modern slang and bits of anachronistic historical and geographical information—to strangely good effect. Though it’s surprising to find a sentence that mentions that a monastery is located on the future Komsomol Square of Pskov, the out-of-time toponym reinforces Arseny’s thoughts that he lives outside of time. As Arseny tells his dead girlfriend, Justina, “…события не всегда протекают во времени… порой они протекают сами по себе. Вынутые из времени.” (“…events don’t always flow in time… now and then they flow on their own. Pulled out of time.”).

Time cycles around and around in Laurus as seasons and lives, with Arseny living through four “books” that cover phases that almost amount to four lives where he is, roughly, healer, holy fool, pilgrim, and monk. Toward the end, Arseny lives in a cave and loses track of years, though he still knows when it’s Sunday. He looks forward to being freed from time and decides the only word he needs to discuss time is однажды, a sort of “once” or “one day” word that reinforces the time when something happens, such as “Однажды он понял, что этого указания вполне достаточно.” (“One day he realized that this indicator was quite enough/all he needed.”) Vodolazkin also includes references to Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, adding another layer to the reader’s perceptions of the temporal setting of Laurus. Also: years are occasionally given in both Anno Mundi and Anno Domini, establishing parallel calendars.

Cathedral of St. John, Pskov.

And Lots More “Alsos”… Arseny’s friendships with Foma, a holy fool who saves Arseny more than once by explaining away Arseny’s erratic-seeming behavior (during his holy fool period), and with Ambrogio, an Italian who comes to Pskov and ends up as Arseny’s traveling companion for a trip to Jerusalem that includes travel through the Alps and a horrendous hurricane at sea… mystical scenes with a wolf… an assortment of apparent miracles… the importance of literacy and words, which can be fatal, as well as the greater and deeper importance of their meanings, something reinforced through Arseny’s many silences and Christopher’s written instructions about herbal medicine, documentation Foma tells Arseny he no longer needs because he treats patients by taking their sins onto himself… a multi-pronged “also”: the tremendous immediacy of Arseny’s relationships with God, himself, his sins, Justina, and nature… the occasional feeling of a Bruegel painting… lots of marginalia reading “ha ha” or “!!” and then, yes, tears at the end of the book even though I knew how it would end… and so on and so on… To sum up: Laurus’s closeness, which never felt claustrophobic, left me with the feeling I’d experienced a strange combination of medieval timelessness, agelessness, life, and death, all of which works inexplicably well thanks to Vodolazkin’s mélange of words.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: From average to very difficult, depending on what sentence you’re reading.

Disclaimers: The usual; I have multiple connections to this book.

Up Next: The Big Book long list will be out on Wednesday. Then Sergei Nosov’s very enjoyable Грачи улетели, which I guess I’ll call The Rooks Have Left or The Rooks Are Gone, to play on the title of Alexei Savrasov’s painting in which the rooks have returned. Then maybe some short stories that have unexpectedly come my way…

Photo Credit: Левкий, via Wikipedia, Creative Commons.

NatsBest’s 2013 Short List & The Poet Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:43:00 +0000

If you’ve been looking for a chance to become a patron of the literary arts—make that the Russian literary arts—your chance has arrived… if, that is, you’d like to sponsor the Russian National Bestseller Award so the 2013 short list can yield a winner. That’s right: NatsBest narrowed its rather long long list into a short list yesterday but is looking for a sponsor to fund the prize. The NatsBest Web site says it will announce details for the 2013 “small jury” and finale if/when a sponsor turns up. Ouch.

So, with the hope that things work out, here’s the 2013 short list, which (of course!) contains a couple titles that are difficult to translate. I’ve included the points that the first jury awarded to each short-listed book.

Maxim Kantor: Красный свет (Red Light, though “свет” can also mean “world,” so I suspect there’s some dual meaning here), 10 points. Kantor said in an interview last year (here) that the book is big, with three storylines (Russian, German, and British), and about twentieth-century history, including revolutions and wars.
Evgenii Vodolazkin: Лавр (Laurus), 7 points. The only book on the list that I’ve read; I’ve drafted a post that I’ll finish soon. It’s especially hard to write because I loved the book…
Il’dar Abuziarov: Мутабор (Mutabor, the Latin first-person singular future passive indicative of mūtō, according to Wiktionary, related to mutate and indicating change or transformation. “Mutabor” is used as a magic word in some stories, including Wilhelm Hauff’s “Caliph Stork.”), 6 points. This book is described as an intellectual chess detective novel, though Abuziarov sees it more as a political thriller. Either way, there’s a booktrailer!
Sof’ia Kupriashina: Видоискательница (hmm, this title plays on the word for viewfinder, putting it in the feminine; it seems to lend itself to voyeuristic storytelling …), 6 points. This book is a short story collection. Kupriashina’s stories apparently often focus largely on society’s margins. But these stories aren’t, according to Kommersant’s Weekend commentator, chernukha.
Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina: Власть мертвых (The Power of the Dead), 5 points. One NatsBest reader-reviewer, Mitya Samoilov, borrowed from the futurists and called this book a slap in the face of (the) public taste.
Figl’-Migl’/Figgle-Miggle: Волки и медведи (Wolves and Bears), 5 points. A Petersburg novel.

As for the poetry award, Lenta.ru reported yesterday that Yevgeny Yevtushenko won the Poet Prize. The Poet Prize is joint effort of the Society for Encouragement of Russian Poetry and Unified Energy Systems; this year’s award is a tidily funded $50,000. Lenta has more on the award here, in a commentary by poet Dmitrii Kuz’min, and Svobodnaya pressa has a piece by Vladimir Novikov here.

Disclosures: The usual.

Up Next: Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which I liked so much. And then Sergei Nosov’s very, very enjoyable Грачи улетели, which I guess I’ll call The Rooks Are Gone, to play on the title of Alexei Savrasov’s painting in which the rooks have returned.

Image: Yevtushenko’s signature, via Wikipedia.

Fear of Flying: Savelyev’s Tereshkova Flies to Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:26:00 +0000

Igor Savelyev’s short novel Терешкова летит на Марс (Mission to Mars in Amanda Love Darragh’s upcoming translation from Glas) takes a dim view of the generation that was in its early twenties during the final moments of December 31, 2006, when Mission to Mars opens. The first sentence in the book is “Путин замолчал.”—“Putin fell silent.” Now that Putin has finished his New Year’s Eve address, there are shots of the Kremlin, then the Russian anthem plays and “2007” flashes on the TV screen.

Mission to Mars focuses on Pasha, an unfocused, unmotivated guy whose very focused, very motivated girlfriend, Natasha, has just moved from provincial Russia to Pittsburgh. Pasha’s the guy who chose the vaguely named “social-humanitarian” department of the pedagogical institute for his higher education: the department is best known for a deficit of males and low admission standards. Pasha’s two best friends are a guy from another city who moved away from some juvenile crime problems and an aspiring writer.

Pasha manages to find himself a job at the airline ARTavia, where Max, a distant relative, works. The airline focuses on вип-клиенты, VIP clients, flying them to Moscow (and only Moscow!) on planes that are all business class. The best part of ARTavia, however, is that it promises no crashes: Max says their liners just can’t, won’t, wouldn’t crash. Ever. ARTavia even holds regular meetings with clients to pound that into their heads like a mantra. Almost literally: it’s interesting to see how Savelyev portrays corporate promises and loyal clients almost like a cult. Pasha, however, learns certain truths about ARTavia and, with a little help from his afore-mentioned friends—and Olga, a young woman whose wealthy parents signed her up for ARTavia—reveals it to the public.

Their handiwork is, as might be expected, not very handy. And things end up badly, very, very badly, between Pasha and Olga, whose company Pasha had been enjoying in Natasha’s absence. It’s not enough to call Pasha’s behavior loutish and disappointing: his absolute lack of feeling and mercy made his rating dive from relatively harmless directionlessness and dumbheadery to real, multileveled cruelty. (I don’t want to say too much, particularly because the book is coming out in translation.)

Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova

Savelyev consistently portrays Pasha as someone who respects people who are goal-oriented—e.g. Natasha, who’s primarily a distant presence—but Pasha just is what he is, writes Savelyev, complete with failures, ups, and downs. It doesn’t make for a very hopeful picture. It’s telling that the figure in the book with the biggest goals isn’t a fictional character: she’s cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova who, despite being 70 years old, says she’d like to fly to Mars. Tereshkova, by the way, really did say that in an interview with a reporter, even answering a question about UFOs by saying she hasn’t seen any but might if she were to fly to Mars.

Mission to Mars reads fairly easily and Savelyev does a nice job placing his characters within a social, personal, and mental stagnation that feels constructed specially for an aimless, hopeless character like Pasha. And his friends. Details like an escalator lady in Moscow and a reference to Twin Peaks add another layer to Pasha’s reality and unreality. The novel is funny at times but it’s also very bleak, so I felt myself wincing more than once at quietly sad details of lives and life… and the feeling of being trapped, something Savelyev describes with substantial success.

Up Next: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which I’m still enjoying.

Disclaimers: I’ve met, briefly, Igor Savelyev several times at book fairs and events and am working on translations for publisher Glas.

Photo of Valentina Tereshkova in 1969, from RIA Novosti, Creative Commons.

A Ridiculously Long & Terribly Inelegant Potpourri: Awards, Events & Conference with Book Fair in Boston

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:53:00 +0000

Awards first: Irina Povolotskaya won the Belkin Prize earlier this month for her Пациент и Гомеопат (The Patient and the Homeopath). And Academia Rossica announced this week at the SLOVO festival that Pola Lem won the Rossica Young Translators Award.

On to conference with book fair: I went to slushy Boston earlier this month for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. The AWP conference is a gigundo event that’s as impersonal as the organization’s name… though I did enjoy a few of the panels and, of course, the book fair, which included lots of small presses and journals. Some conference highlights… for writing technique: Peter Elbow’s talk “The Wisdom of the Tongue: Harnessing the Music of Speech for Good Writing,” looked at intonation units in speech and gave me some great theory to back up my practices for translating dialogue. I can see why one writing teacher told me Elbow’s considered a rock star in the field; I was only too happy to order up his Vernacular Eloquence… for translation: panels on Polish poetry, where it was fun to recognize commonalities with Russian, and hearing James Ragan read from and speak about his translations of poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ragan said he never stops worrying that he missed something or somehow failed… for disappointment: the lowestlight of the conference was that the room for the panel “Opening Her Veins: Variations on Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva in Two Voices” was so far beyond SRO that I couldn’t even stand in the hallway to hear the speakers. On the bright side: of course I’m very happy Tsvetaeva is such a draw!

The book fair gave me a bunch more entries for past, present, and future translation lists, so I’ve already made some updates to the 2012 and 2013 lists and started thinking about 2014. A few to mention… New York Review Books will publish a new Krzhizhanovsky collection (translator, Joanne Turnbull) in October and a new Pushkin collection (translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) next year… A Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, has a lovely illustrated edition of three Chekhov stories, About Love, translated by David Helwig… Northwestern University Press publishes quite a few translations of Russian-language books and had many on display, including copies of Anne O. Fisher’s translation of Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs, Diane Nemec Ignashev’s translation of Victor Martinovich’s Paranoia, as well as a bilingual book of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work that includes translations by Robin Kemball. And I bought Erik Butler’s translation (from the Yiddish) of Der Nister’s Regrowth… It was also nice to see Zephyr Press’s books: Zephyr has a huge selection of translations by Central and East European authors, mostly poets published in bilingual editions… One of my favorite books I brought home came from the people of Merriam-Webster, who gave me the Dictionary of English Usage for my reference shelf… On a non-Russian note, I’m also excited about Lionheart, James Anderson’s translation of Thorvald Steen’s Norwegian-language novel, which University of Chicabo Press/Seagull Books gave me… I brought back two huge stacks of books so will stop there.

Alexander Vvedensky

Off-site events were the real highpoint of AWP, perhaps because they were planned by organizations not called AWP. An evening-with-poetry in a restaurant, for example, included readings of Danuta Borchardt’s translations of Cyprian Norwid and Barbara Siegel Carlson’s translations of Srečko Kosovel… as well as my introduction to a Russian theater in the Boston area, Theater on the Roof. An event with St. Petersburg Review that began with readings by Kadija George, Brian Sousa, and Irina Mashinski was a great opportunity to finally meet Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, the editors of Rasskazy, in real life. Parker and Maria Gusev, who was also in Boston, are translating Zakhar Prilepin’s San’kya. My favorite event, though, was a reading at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, where translators read from new collections from New York Review Books. Don Share read from Miguel Hernández and Matvei Yankelevich read from An Invitation for Me to Think, a book of translations of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry for which Eugene Ostashevsky is listed as selector and primary translator, with Yankelevich providing additional translations. Edwin Frank, NYRB’s editorial director, likened the books to “poetry baseball cards,” fittingly so since the books are small and brightly colored, with a “collect them all” feel. Titles like “Stomach Rumbling During Confession of Love” are certainly memorable.

As for coming events: anyone in the New York area interested in hearing Ostashevsky and Yankelevich read their translations of Vvedensky—and/or Share reading his translations of Hernández, which I also enjoyed—is in lots of luck. Read Russia is hosting a book launch party on March 27 for An Invitation for Me To Think. Then NYRB will host four related events in April; three will focus on the Russian Avant-Garde and OBERIU. (NYRB April event calendar) Speakers will include Ostashevsky and Yankelevich, plus Richard Sieburth, Michael Kunichika, Bela Shayevich, Ainsley Morse, and Kirill Medvedev. A special note on Kirill Medvedev: I bought It’s No Good, an English-language collection of Medvedev’s writings, from Ugly Duckling Presse at the AWP book fair and couldn’t put it down during my Amtrak ride home. The book is described as including poems, essays, and actions; it’s translated by Keith Gessen (who also wrote an introduction) with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich. Gessen writes in his introduction, “I don’t know if our translations can capture the honesty, transparency, and passion of Medvedev’s writing, both in his essays and in his poems, but we’ve tried.” I’ve only read teeny snippets of Medvedev’s poetry in Russian and haven’t compared translations with originals but as I read I could certainly feel all the things Gessen was hoping to capture. And a lot more. Here are three reviews of It’s No Good that help explain: New York Times (Dwight Garner), Los Angeles Review of Books (Jeff Parker), and Three Percent (Will Evans).

Though I’m sorry none of these events are close enough for my calendar, I have a great consolation prize: Dina Khapaeva will speak about “When Dostoevsky’s Nightmares are Coming True: Gothic Aesthetics in Contemporary Russian Society” at Bowdoin College on March 27. I’ve read and enjoyed chunks of Khapaeva’s very engaging Кошмар: литература и жизнь (Nightmare: Literature and Life)—she covers writers including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Pelevin—so am looking forward to her talk. Maybe I’ll even write about it.

Up Next: Igor Savelyev’s Tereshkova Flies to Mars, a noughties novel known as Mission to Mars in English: Amanda Love Darragh’s translation will be out this summer from Glas. And then Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which brings me back to the Middle Ages in just the right way.

Disclaimers: The usual. In addition to the books I mentioned receiving from publishers at no charge, NYRB sent me a review copy of the Vvedensky book; I am collaborating on a story that will appear in a book that NYRB will publish.

Favorite Russian Writers А to Я: Rybakov

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 21:42:00 +0000

Alphabet favorites are back! Though my entry for the Letter R (Р) is a bit limited in terms of all-out favorites, there are enough writers I like—with the hope for turns to the even-more-positive—that I’m not going to skip R like I skipped N and O.

My one true favorite for R is Anatolii Rybakov, despite my somewhat limited experience reading him: Rybakov’s Дети Арбата (Children of the Arbat), the first volume of a trilogy, is enough. I read the trilogy before I started writing the blog but I did keep a book diary then, where I praised the first volume most, called the second “awful,” and summed up with, “The books were definitely flawed but they did manage to capture something important: the mood and stories of a lost portion of a generation.” Rybakov’s Тяжёлый песок (Heavy Sand) (previous post) left me with mixed feelings a few years ago, too, but I suspect I’d probably appreciate its characters and storytelling techniques far more now, after reading so much more fiction (much of it by Margarita Khemlin, who’s also from Chernigov) set in Ukraine. I also have a sentimental reason for favoriting Rybakov: he made a reading in my department when I was in grad school. I think this was in 1986, though I remember almost nothing except that Rybakov made a positive impression.

Another R-letter writer I’ve enjoyed is Irina Ratushinskaya; I read Alyona Kojevnikov’s translation of Ratushinskaya’s prison camp memoir Grey Is the Color of Hope in the late eighties or early nineties. I read a fair bit of fiction and nonfiction about prison camps when I was in college but I think Ratushinskaya’s book has stuck with me through the years because her story was contemporary: she was in prison in 1983, the year I first visited the Soviet Union. Ratushinskaya’s Тень портрета (The Portrait’s Shadow) didn’t impress me much in my preblog years but I’ve heard good things about her Одесситы (The Odessans), which I bought last year and keep meaning to read sooner rather than later.

As for others… Andrei Rubanov is another writer that’s left me with mixed impressions: his Chlorophyllia (previous post) and All That Glitters (previous post) were both enjoyable and pretty decent but just didn’t feel quite as good as I thought they should/could/would be. I read some of the stories in Rubanov’s Shameful Feats/Exploits at the beach last summer and thought they were decent, too. As with Dina Rubina (see below!), Rubanov’s short fiction feels more controlled and focused than his novels. I like Rubanov’s ability to combine genres and appreciate his blunt talk very, very much.

I’ve also enjoyed some of Dina Rubina’s writing, particularly her short story “Apples from Shlitzbutter’s Garden” (previous post), though I find some of her writing too overstuffed with detail. I have a couple collections of Rubina’s short and medium-length works—several readers have particularly recommended her shorter, earlier writings to me—and hope to find more that I like.

Remizov.

As for classics, hmm, well, I guess I’m pretty much at zero… I have some vague remembrance of reading Kondratii Ryleev’s poetry in grad school but am probably more likely to seek out Aleksei Remizov, whom I seem to have ignored all these years. He sounds like a stylistically interesting writer, so I’d welcome recommendations! And there’s one modern poet that’s been recommended to me many times over the years, Nikolai Rubtsov, whose books I received as gifts back in the late eighties or early nineties.

Up Next: A trip report about the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in slushy Boston. Igor Savelyev’s Tereshkova Flies to Mars, known as Mission to Mars in English: Amanda Love Darragh’s translation will be out this summer from Glas. And then Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus.

Image: Aleksei Remizov, via Wikipedia.

Anywhere But Here: Sherga’s Underground Ship

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:19:00 +0000

Ekaterina Sherga’s Подземный корабль (The Underground Ship) is a neatly structured novel about Moscow in the noughties, in 2003, a setting that feels, in Sherga’s treatment, like a terribly lonely place. Sherga builds her novel in two lines, focusing on two main characters and their living spaces: Mstislav Romanovich Morokhov, a businessman, has just moved into an apartment complex called Madagascar and Alexander L. comes to inhabit an exclusive museum-like store called British Empire.

The Underground Ship tacks more toward atmosphere than plot, and Sherga, who writes with a light but very confident touch, somehow manages to build suspense that draws, in large part, on the two men’s housing situations. Madagascar is a brand-new double-tower complex but Morokhov is its only resident, swimming in the pool, ordering drinks from the bar, and occasionally running across mysterious people who aren’t members of the complex’s staff. The whole Madagascar experience seems more than a little strange; a description of a marketing video that shows a man grilling four huge skewers of shashlik sums things up nicely. The man smiles and the camera pulls away, showing the size of an uninhabited terrace, then we get, “Кого он собрался кормить? Какая-то метафора тотального одиночества.” (“Who was he going to feed? What a metaphor for total loneliness.”)

Alexander L. comes into the book a bit later, after he and Morokhov are in the same restaurant at the same time: one of Morokhov’s friends tries to remember details about Alexander L. but comes up short. Alexander L. overhears their conversation and commences to tell his own story, in diary form. He describes his work at oddball organizations (e.g. the Club for Traditional Values, which really brought me back to my years in Moscow) and then his hiring as a night watchman at British Empire, where he’s surrounded by lovely antique items. After British Empire stops serving the public, (not that much of anybody ever came to buy much of anything anyway), Alexander L. stays on rent-free, not quite able to figure out who runs things. He eventually gets in touch with old friends and slides into a new career.

I found the housing situations in The Underground Ship the most interesting piece of the book: Morokhov and Alexander L. both live alone, rattling around fairly large abodes and doing far more than just escaping the crowded communal apartments in fiction set in the Soviet era. Morokhov solves a mystery of sorts, even if it’s only a mystery to him. And Alexander L. feels like a cousin of other apartment sitters I’ve met—the main character of Mikhail Butov’s Freedom, for example, and Petrovich in Vladimir Makanin’s Underground—meaning he’s uncertain about his place in life. He even has to go through all sorts of fuss to gather up his documents, papers that prove aspects his identity. In the course of retrieving his papers, he takes a bus, where the man next to him throws up. Alexander L. sits there, cold, tired, broke, unemployed. “Вот что я, такой умный, получил от жизни, смог выбить из неё. Вот мне за всё награда.” (Literally, “There’s what I, so smart, got from life, what I managed to beat out of it. There’s my reward for everything.”)

Of course Morokhov and Alexander L. both live in housing named for far-away places. And both places also feel temporally removed from 2003 Moscow, with the British Empire focused on the past—there’s even an old globe to emphasize geopolitical changes—and the uninhabited Madagascar feeling futuristic with its zipping elevators and modern architecture. The housing gives the impression that both men are living “anywhere but here.” Meaning anywhere but Moscow, Russia.

Morokhov doesn’t pretend to live on Madagascar and Alexander L. hasn’t traveled across time and borders to the British Empire, but both men seem, for varying reasons and to varying degrees, to be experiencing forms of what’s known in Russian as “внутренняя эмиграция” (internal emigration). Their (e)migrations become more real, more external, as the book progresses, though I don’t want to explain why. The two men’s plot lines briefly converge a few times but their situations complement each other beautifully, alternating and creating a steady balance of surrealism (a candle made to look like Morokhov’s head), odd humor (a party at which Titanic is reenacted), and suspense (who’s really running things?). All of which results in a wonderfully readable novel that feels both very real and, foggily, almost creepily, very abstract and lonely. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

P.S. I should have mentioned the SLOVO Russian Literature Festival, which begins in London on March 5, ages ago... but better late than never! Thank you to Academia Rossica for the reminder. Here’s the schedule: it includes some fun-sounding events, like, oh, a translator roundtable. I won’t be there but I’m going to Boston for a few days next week, for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, which has some interesting international and translation-related events on the schedule, too.

Disclaimers: I learned about The Underground Ship from author Ekaterina Sherga, a Facebook friend I have yet to met in real life.

Up Next: Favorites from the letter R. Igor Savelyev’s Терешкова летит на Марс, which is coming out this summer in Amanda Love Darragh’s translation for Glas; it’s known as Mission to Mars. Though I’ve only read a small part of Savelyev’s book, it feels like a nice follow up to The Underground Ship: it also takes place in the noughties and looks at ambitions, lifestyles, and crossing borders.

Snowy Day (Yet Again!) Potpourri: Two News Items & Two Books

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:41:00 +0000

First, two brief news items...

This year’s Prix Russophonie went to Hélène Henri-Safier for her French translation of Dmitrii Bykov’s Pasternak. Henri-Safier’s translation of Pasternak also won the 2012 Read Russia award, in the contemporary literature category. Further details about the Prix Russophonie are online here. Other finalists for the prize translated Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Girshovich, and a band of OBERIU writers.

Poet, translator, and publisher Maksim Amelin won the Solzhenitsyn Prize today. Several of Amelin’s poems are included in the bilingual collection Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and Jim Kates; the book is from Dalkey Archive.

Now, two brief notes on books…


Konstantin Flavitskii's not-quite-real account.

Grigorii Danilevskii’s Княжна Тараканова (Princess Tarakanova where the princess word means a prince’s unmarried daughter, oy, oy, oy!) is an 1883 historical novel about the demise of pretendress Elizaveta Tarakanova, who claimed to be the daughter of Empress Elizabeth. Danilevskii tells his version of the story in two parts: the first is the diary of naval lieutenant Pavel Kontsov, who meets Tarakanova after he escapes from an Istanbul prison; his previous adventures include serving in the Battle of Chesma in 1770. True to his time, Kontsov tells his story as a confession of sorts, mentions Kheraskov (!), and experiences perils both sentimental and maritime. Kontsov writes his diary in 1775 on a ship, The Northern Eagle, stuffing the pages into a bottle that he tosses overboard during a storm he fears will wreck the ship.

Do not fear, dear readers: the bottle and the diary are, of course, found in the second half of the book! The second section, told in a rather bland third-person narrative, also includes scenes of the captured Tarakanova in Peter and Paul Fortress and a wrapping up of various loose ends from Kontsov’s story. Catherine the Great is also present. All in all, I wouldn’t say Princess Tarakanova is great literature but it made for moderately entertaining, easy reading on tired evenings. The highlight was Danilevskii’s nineteenth-century take on the eighteenth century.

An Armenian Sketchbook is Vasily Grossman’s Добро вам, literally Good to You, in a translation from Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; I read the Chandlers’ translation. Grossman wrote An Armenian Sketchbook about his 1961 travel to Armenia, where he went to rewrite a literal Armenian-Russian translation of a novel by Hrachya Kochar. Grossman hardly writes about the work, the writer, or the translator—I’ll admit this was, initially, a disappointment for me—but I found his descriptions of and reflections on things like Armenia’s stone (“Here, we were still in the Stone Age.”), poverty, history, and trout surprisingly absorbing. In describing village life, for example, Grossman catalogues certain residents’ criminal activity and I scribbled in the margins that the passage reads like true-life чернуха, that dark naturalism I’ve mentioned so many times before.

Robert Chandler and Yuri Bit-Yunan’s very helpful introduction to An Armenian Sketchbook notes the “deeply personal” and spontaneous nature of the writing in Sketchbook and mentions that Grossman was, at the time, in the early stages of cancer, which caused him physical difficulties that are detailed in the book. Mortality is a frequent motif and in one scene, after some heavy drinking, Grossman writes, “At this point I realized that I was dying.” He describes some of these sensations—his “I,” for example, separating from his physical body, and aloneness—then, two pages later writes, “If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experiences.” Grossman closes Sketchbook with some lovely descriptions of a wedding that culminates, at least in Grossman’s account, in a dance with candles. Two of his last lines are, “Probably I have said much that is clumsy and wrong. But all I have said, clumsy or not, I have said with love.” I think it’s that love, along with the spontaneity that Chandler and Bit-Yunan mention in their introduction, that appealed to me so much in An Armenian Sketchbook.

Disclosures: The usual for the news items. I received a copy of An Armenian Sketchbook from the publisher, New York Review Books; I am collaborating with Robert Chandler on a story by Andrei Platonov for a collection that NYRB will publish.

Up Next: Ekaterina Sherga’s The Underground Ship, which just took an interesting turn. And maybe favorites from the letter R… we’ll see.

Blizzards: Butov’s Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:37:00 +0000

I started writing about Mikhail Butov’s Свобода (Freedom) last weekend, when more than 30 inches of fresh blizzard-begotten snow were still languishing outside my office window. Blizzard memories felt perfect for Freedom, a book that isn’t just a blizzard of words and ideas about aimlessness in the 1990s: Butov includes a set piece about a winter camping trip, complete with a blinding snowstorm, ill-preparedness, and references to Jack London.

Freedom, which is narrated by a nameless (I don’t think I missed a name…) first-person narrator who loses his job early in the book, is filled with metaphors for loss of direction and loss of one’s place in the world. Like several other narrators I’ve met—Makanin’s Petrovich in Underground, which lost the 1999 Russian Booker to Freedom, comes to mind—Butov’s character apartment sits for a friend. The friend has gone off to Antarctica; people go to the ends of the earth in this book. Our narrator doesn’t seem to mind being alone a lot, though he’s not strictly alone: he shares his friend’s apartment with a menagerie of mice, rats, roaches, regular flies, fruit flies (there’s a trash chute problem, something I seem to be finding a lot lately), and spiders. Only the spiders cross the threshold into the room where the narrator sleeps. The narrator feeds and even names one spider. Ursus.

I found myself surprisingly agreeable to reading about Ursus and urban solitude and solitariness: Butov’s descriptions of detachment and emotion can be very striking. In one, the hungover narrator vomits into the sink, after which,

Потом я стоял у окна, очень пустой и очень легкий, и двор, еще безлюдный ранним воскресным утром, видел сквозь сгусток внутренней своей темноты. И вдруг, прямо у меня на глазах, стал падать первый снег. Неуверенный и мелкий, как соль, он таял, едва достигал асфальта, — но брал числом, и площадка для машин перед домом медленно покрывалась белым.

Тогда я заплакал. От полноты переживания.

Then I stood at the window, very empty and very (s)light, and I saw, through a clot of my internal darkness, the yard, which was still unpopulated on an early Sunday morning. And suddenly the first snow began to fall right before my eyes. Uncertain and as fine as salt, it melted as soon as it reached the pavement, but it accumulated and the parking area in front of the building slowly whitened.

Then I began to weep. From the fullness/completeness of the feeling/experience/suffering.

I’ve purposely left the translated paragraph fairly literal, with alternate meanings and favorite Russian tics, like вдруг/suddenly. That last line reminds me of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, particularly after the narrator’s physical emptiness...

Our narrator doesn’t spend the whole book alone, though. There are some brief scenes with an occasional female caller and he visits his mother toward the end of the book. And the anonymous narrator spends lots of time with a college friend, Andriukha, an adventurer whose self-destructive tendencies lead to problems with money, ill-gotten goods, and petty criminals. The lone narrator and Andriukha sometimes feel as antipodal as Freedom’s Antarctica and far north.

The wonder of Freedom is that it works at all: as you can probably tell, it’s lumpy and fairly plotless, and the narrator himself says toward the end that he began by stringing together some funny stories, not thinking they’d turn into an adieu to youth. And Freedom is so dense I reread enough passages that I can practically say I’ve already read the book twice. But the time and effort were more than worth it: for the first snow, for the damn spider, for the narrator’s mother’s clock collection, for a telescope in a kiosk, and for a conversation with Andriukha about death-and-will-it-happen, the conversation we’re supposed to avoid. It’s the combination of Big Things and little things that got to me. And the spontaneous powerful feelings. There’s also a globe factory. Learning about birds from matchboxes. And a reference to railroad stuff and Platonov characters, how could I not appreciate that? Finally, there’s a mention of Tunguska. This is my sixth Tunguska tag, dear readers!

Disclosures: I met Mikhail Butov in Moscow last year through Dmitrii Danilov, who pulled Freedom off a bookstore shelf and recommended it to me as a favorite. I have already thanked him.

Up Next: Grigorii Danilevskii’s Princess Tarakanova, an easy-reading historical novel and Vasily Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook. Then Ekaterina Sherga’s The Underground Ship, which I’m enjoying. My morbid fascination with Elena Katishonok’s Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife has come to an end (it feels too goopy and dull, particularly when I have so many other books on the shelves), and I’m reading Mikhail Gigolashvili’s The Capture of Muscovy slowly: his language-based humor can be very, very funny but the book could have used some significant edits.

More News on Awards: Belkin Short List & NatsBest Long List

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:17:00 +0000

The Belkin Prize, which recognizes long stories/novellas, announced its short list last week, something I somehow missed—we’ll just blame that on blizzard preparations—until I saw a post on the blog known as Заметил просто.

Almost all the Belkin finalists are new to me—the jury, led by Yury Buida, skipped over known nominees like Zakhar Prilepin and Roman Senchin—but virtual introductions are what endeared Belkin to me in the first place. Something else to like: all the nominated works are available on Журнальный зал. (Заметил просто made things easy for me by including all the links in his post.) The winner will be named during Maslenitsa in the atrium of the Pushkin Museum. If you, like me, aren’t up on your Maslenitsa calendar, it’s March 11-17 this year. Meaning it’s almost time for some bliny.

Here’s the Belkin short list in Russian alphabetical order, by surname:

Dmitrii Vereshchagin’s Заманиловка (Oh my… never a dull moment with titles. The title word, zamanilovka, was new to me: it can refer to exaggerations, often inflated advertising claims intended to lure someone in, so perhaps something like “bait and switch” or “scam” could work, depending on context. A couple of online dictionaries list it as “teaser,” though that sounds milder than the slang dictionary I checked… and the uses in the story seem, at least on first glance, to vary. Anyway, this novella begins with Stalin appearing in the narrator’s dream…)

Dmitrii Ishchenko’s Териберка (Teriberka, a geographical name, ha!, for a small town on the shore of the Barents Sea. This sounds like my kind of geographical setting.)

Irina Povolotskaia’s Пациент и Гомеопат (The Patient and the Homeopath)

Gennadii Prashkevich’s Упячка-25 (Upyachka-25… yet another quirky one! Upyachka is the name of painfully stupid Russian Web site… “upyachka” is even listed on Urban Dictionary, with two definitions.)

Vladimir Kholodov’s Шанс (Chance, I’ll go with the easiest possible translation, the path of least resistance after Upyachka.)

Meanwhile, in The Land of the National Bestseller Award, there are so many titles on the long list that I could just cherry-pick the ones that are easy to translate! I’ll mention a few… First off, it’s easy to notice that Eduard Limonov’s В Сырах (In Syry) was nominated more times than any other book. Three. Limonov, who’s pretty well-known thanks to decades of writing and rabblerousing, isn’t exactly in need of a National Bestseller award to “wake up famous.” I noticed two other writers with more than one nomination: Platon Besedin for Книга греха (The/A Book of Sin) and Olga Novikova for Каждый убивал (Each One Killed). Two books are already on my shelf: Yevgenii Vodolazkin’s Лавр (literally Laurel but known as Brother Laurus for translation purposes) and Igor Savelyev’s Терешкова летит на Марс (Tereshkova is Flying to Mars, which is coming out in Amanda Love Darragh’s translation this year, from Glas, as Mission to Mars). There are also a few writers I’ve read before: Viktor Martinovich was nominated for Сфагнум (Sphagnum, which I never realized was spelled quite this way in English, thanks, NatsBest…) and Il’ia Boiashov was nominated for Эдем (Eden). And I’ve read one story in Alexander Snegirev’s collection, Чувство вины (Guilt Feeling/Feeling of Guilt): “The Internal Enemy,” which I summed up here. Beyond those names and a few I’d heard of but never read or read very little of—e.g. Igor Sakhnovskii, Vladimir Kozlov, Anna Matveeva, and Sergei Nosov—around half the list is new to me.

For more on NatsBest: the long list, the nominator list, and commentary from NatsBest head Viktor Toporov that, among other things, notes a revenge of the complex over the simple. And a near absence of nonfiction. Yes, I’ve way oversimplified. The short list will be out on April 16 and the winner will be named on June 2.

Disclaimer: The usual.

Up Next: Mikhail Butov’s Freedom. Then Grigory Danilevsky’s Princess Tarakanova, probably together with Vasily Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook.

NOSE Award & Several Translation Competitions and Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 21:32:00 +0000

2013 NOSE prizes were awarded yesterday: Lev Rubinshtein won the jury prize for Знаки внимания (Signs of Attention), a collection of columns from various publications and various years. Aleksei Motorov won the readers’ prize for his autobiographical novel Юные годы медбрата Паровозова (Male Nurse Parovozov’s Young Years). I haven’t read any of the books on the NOSE short list (previous post)… though I do intend to get to Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Захват Московии (The Capture of Muscovy) someday soon. NOSE prizes are awarded by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.

Meanwhile, Academia Rossica sent me a note about this year’s Rossica Young Translators Award. Full information is online here but here are key details... “Young” means you must be 24 or under on the deadline for entries, which is March 10, 2013. The three excerpts from which to choose are by Eduard Limonov, Boris Akunin, and Marina Stepnova. Chalk one up for variety! Judges are Oliver Ready, Amanda Love Darragh, and Daniel M. Jaffe. Oh, and the prize is £500.

Finally, the Institute of Translation announced that it is accepting entries for the next Read Russia translation prize, which will be awarded in 2014. Entries—this means books (translations) published by non-Russian publishers during 2012 and 2013—will be accepted throughout 2013. At the moment, there’s only information available in Russian (here) but the four categories for awards haven’t changed from last year: I listed 2012’s winners in a previous post. The Institute is also taking proposals for translation grants. There’s information online in Russian and in English. The deadline of March 31, 2013, may be extended through May 2013.

Update on the 2013Translation List. Several of you sent information on translations coming out in 2013. I have duly added them, so consider the list refreshed. I’m happy to add more: all genres are welcome to participate!

Up Next: Mikhail Butov’s Freedom, where I found a spider particularly endearing. And, at some future juncture, Elena Katishonok’s Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife, which I still don’t like. At all… though I’m reading it (albeit at a plodding pace) with an almost morbid fascination because I’m gaining a better understanding of what I don’t like in a novel. It’s a very interesting personal case study, particularly because I do see what other readers like about the book. Also: Grigorii Danilevskii’s Princess Tarakanova, a historical novel I picked up for some easy/easier reading on sleepy weeknights.

Disclosures: The usual. I collaborate with the Read Russia program, including the Institute of Translation.

Notable New Translations: The 2013 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:01:00 +0000

January seems like as good a time as any to start a list of translations scheduled for release in 2013… And “start” is the operative word: this alphabetical (by author surname) list truly is just a start since I still need to check in with a few translators and publishers. I’m placing a link to the list in the “Other Reading Ideas” section of the blog’s sidebar so it’s easy to find... it’s just below the freshly updated list for 2012.

A few caveats. Release dates and titles are subject to change. Wherever possible, I’ve linked to publisher pages (on the publisher’s name) and Amazon pages (on the book title). A few books on the list are reissues. This is a global list. If you have a book you’d like me to list (or, horrors, find an error that needs correction!), please send me a note. I already have a few titles for 2014, so I’ll be happy to take more of those, too.

Edit, January 28: Oops, yesterday I forgot to include a link to Daniel Kalder’s Publishing Perspectives interview with Peter Mayer of Overlook Press about the Russian Library project... the project will apparently go on for a decade or so. Here it is!

Enjoy the list: there’s a lot of variety!

Aleshkovskii, Petr: Stargorod, translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray; Russian Life, February 2013.

Babiashkina, Anna: Before I Croak, translated by Muireann Maguire; Glas, August 12, 2013.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Crocodile, translated by S.D. Cioran; reissue, The Overlook Press/Ardis, out now.

Faleev, Dmitry: Rhinoceros: Tales of Transgression, translated by Arch Tait; Glas, 2013.

Frei, Max: The Stranger's Shadow: The Labyrinths of Echo, translated by Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore; The Overlook Press, May 16, 2013.

Gelasimov, Andrei, The Lying Year, translated by Marian Schwartz; AmazonCrossing, out now. (I’ve read several of Gelasimov’s books: this is my favorite.)

Gelasimov, Andrei: Gods of the Steppe, translated by Marian Schwartz, AmazonCrossing, September 3, 2013.

Grossman, Vasily: An Armenian Sketchbook, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler; New York Review Books, February 19, 2013. (I’ll be writing about this book relatively soon…)

Kharms, Daniil: "I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms, selected, translated and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto; Academic Studies Press, February 2013.

Krzhizhanovsky, Sigizmund: Autobiography of a Corpse, translated by Joanne Turnbull; New York Review Books, October 2013.

Kurkov, Andrey: a translation of Садовник из Очакова (literally, The Gardener from Ochakov, though the book may be titled differently), translated by Amanda Love Darragh; Harvill Secker, August 2013.

Leskov, Nikolai: The Enchanted Wanderer: and Other Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; Knopf, March 26, 2013. (Over 600 pages of Leskov, wow!)

Lorchenkov,Vladimir: The Good Life Elsewhere, translated by Ross Ufberg; New Vessel Press, November 2013.

Martinovich, Victor: Paranoia, translated by Diane Nemec Ignashev; Northwestern, March 31, 2013.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir: Selected Poems, translated by James H. McGavran III; Northwestern, June 2013.

Nekrasov, Vsevolod: I Live I See: Selected Poems, translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich; Ugly Duckling Presse, June 1, 2013.

Nikitin, Alexei: Istemi, translated by Anne Marie Jackson; publisher Peter Owen, May 1, 2013.

Pavlov, Oleg: Captain of the Steppe, translated by Ian Appleby; And Other Stories, April 16, 2013.

Pavlov, Oleg: Asystole, translated by anonymous; Glagloslav, December 1, 2013.

Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, translated by Anna Summers; Penguin, out now.

Pilnyak, Boris: The Naked Year, translated by A.R. Tulloch; reissue, The Overlook Press/Ardis, June 25, 2013. (A grad school favorite…)

Prokhorova, Irina, ed: 1990: Russians Remember a Turning Point, translated by Arch Tait; Quercus, March 28, 2013.

Sadulaev, German: Maya Pill, translated by Carol Apollonio; Dalkey Archive Press, November 2013.

Saltykov(-Shchedrin), Mikhail: The Golovlyov Family, translated by S.D. Cioran; reissue, The Overlook Press/Ardis, out now. (A dysfunctional family before we knew the term… almost scarily claustrophobic, very good.)

Savelyev, Igor: Mission to Mars, translated by Amanda Love Darragh; Glas, summer 2013. (I brought this book back from Moscow and plan to read it soon…)

Shargunov, Sergei: A Book Without Photographs, translated by anonymous; Glagoslav, May 27, 2013.

Sharov, Vladimir: Before and During, translated by Oliver Ready; Dedalus, June/July 2013. (This sounds like an interesting book... and I just have to add that Dedalus also has an anthology of Lithuanian literature coming out as well as The Dedalus Book of Vodka, by Geoffrey Elborn.)

Shishkin, Mikhail: The Light and the Dark, translated by Andrew Bromfield; Quercus, February 28, 2013. (A more literal translated title would be Letter-Book.)

Snegirev, Alexander: Petroleum Venus, translated by Arch Tait; Glas, out now.

Tsypkin, Leonid: The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works, translated by Jamey Gambrell; New Directions, February 13, 2013.

Vachedin, Dmitry: Snow Germans, translated by Arch Tait; Glas, April 16, 2013.

Vvedensky, Alexander: An Invitation For Me To Think, edited and translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translation by Matvei Yankelevich; New York Review Books, April 2, 2013.

Yuzefovich, Leonid: Harlequin’s Costume, translated by Marian Schwartz; publisher Glagoslav, the ides of March.

Various: Red Spectres, short stories translated by Muireann Maguire; The Overlook Press, April 18, 2013, though already out in the UK. (Muireann selected and translated eleven stories from writers including Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and Aleksandr Chayanov... I’m looking forward to this one!)

Various: Relocations: Three Contemporary Russian Women Poets, poetry by Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova, translated by Catherine Ciepiela, Anna Khasin, and Sibelan Forrester; Zephyr Press, August 13, 2013. (This book is in a series called In the Grip of Strange Thoughts... it is apparently a bilingual edition.)

Disclaimers: The usual, with too many specifics to list: I’ve met, worked on paid projects, discussed translation and specific projects, chatted and shared meals with, and/or otherwise been in contact with numerous individuals and entities mentioned in this post. I received review copies of some books listed. Amazon links are affiliate links.

Popov’s Dance to Death

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 02:18:00 +0000

Valerii Popov’s Плясать до смерти (Dance to Death or To Dance to Death or Dance to the Death), a 2012 Big Book finalist, had a stronger and stranger effect on me than I thought it did when I was reading: if I were a publicist or merchandiser choosing a clichéd one-adjective description, I’d pick something like “searing.” A warning: it’s awkward to describe the book without revealing its topic, which I’ll do without providing too many details, though the term “spoiler” sounds frivolous in the context of Dance to Death.

Fiction & Non. Dance to Death is a novel based on the life and death of the real Valerii Popov’s real daughter Nastya. The book’s narrator, Valerii Popov, begins by seeing his wife Nonna off to the birth house; he and a friend celebrate with a drift along the Neva and some vodka. The first notion of trouble for Nastya comes at birth: the doctor mentions trauma. Nastya’s whole life, which ends early because of alcohol, is filled with emotional and physical traumas. Timewise, the novel’s setting coincides with the geopolitical trauma of the demise of the USSR. Though Dance to Death reads to me like something in between creative nonfiction and a documentary novel—publisher AST’s blurb on ozon.ru even refers to it as a confessional novel—and Popov includes lots of unpleasant details, I wouldn’t quite categorize the book as heavily naturalistic or voyeuristic. That may, however, be because I’d expected more naturalism than Popov provides.

Goya's Burial of the Sardine
is perfect for the cover

Theme & Language/Stylistics. Which means Dance to Death feels unusual, too, because Popov doesn’t focus exclusively on trauma. Though he mentions that a pet bird pecked Nastya’s cheek when she was small, he seethes when an old friend slights her in her short adulthood, and there is plenty of other assorted madness, the book is often relentlessly, almost surrealistically, upbeat, filled with exclamation points, optimism, and, less surprising, love. In a brief review for afisha.ru, critic Lev Danilkin says that if Dance to Death weren’t based on a true story, it might be described as a “literary experiment,” an attempt at a happy narrative about something horrible. I think Popov’s stylistics do feel like an experiment, though, as if he’s trying to find an appropriate, adequate language for mourning his daughter—his language allows him to combine positive and negative. The exclamation points and short sentences often irritated me, particularly early on, but I think Popov found a decent balance that fits his topic and perspective.

Indifference. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator blames Nastya’s death on genetics rather than Nastya, who had always been willful. He has also mentioned, in passing, Nonna’s drinking, about which he wrote separately, in Третье дыхание (A Third Wind). Citing genetics squares well, I think, with the narrator’s reaction to an exchange with Nastya toward the end of the book, in which Nastya tells him he’s indifferent to everything. The next lines, which are a bit awkward pulled out of their environment, are written for the reader, not spoken to Nastya: “Да. Теперь – безралично. Ниаче – пропадешь.” (“Yes. Now I’m indifferent. Otherwise you’re lost.”)

The Effect. I think that one word—indifference—is why the book stuck with me. It’s not that I think the narrator was, literally, indifferent to his daughter’s death: I saw his indifference as a layer of protection, a Chekhovian case of sorts that’s a survival mechanism. The blogger known as Заметил просто writes about this from a different angle, noting that the narrator’s father has a fighter’s character, something the narrator tells Nastya she has, too. But Заметил просто writes that, by keeping a distance and seeming indecisive, the narrator doesn’t seem to be much of a fighter, leading ЗП to wonder if he has the correct impression of the narrator. I wondered about that, too, and that’s what still eats at me, several weeks after finishing the book.

Reading Mikhail Zolotonosov’s review of A Third Wind in Moskovskie novosti helped me understand why. Zolotonosov concludes his piece (I’ll summarize) by citing Popov as an example of a problem he sees in contemporary Russian literature: too much case history and naturalism, not enough focus on moral problems and choices, leading to a lack of artistry. He also wonders about the wisdom of writing about the sufferings of one’s family. Much of Zolotonosov’s criticism could apply to Dance to Death: though Dance to Death wasn’t my favorite type of book—I like laconic but this is an extreme example, plus the balance between truth and fiction felt a bit too uneasy—it certainly got to me, so I have to say it works on some level, if I accept it on its own terms. But Zolotonosov’s review got me thinking… about moral drift, which got me thinking back to the narrator’s float on the Neva at the beginning of the book, which got me thinking about moral decisions, which got me thinking about the absurdity of horrible choices we all have to make in life before we die, which got me thinking that Dance to Death’s open-endedness might inspire, intentionally or not, more thinking about moral decisions than a stance on how to handle a difficult child like Nastya or the complex and intractable problem of alcoholism.

Up next. Translations coming out in 2013: send me a note if you’re a translator or publisher with a new translation scheduled for this year. Then maybe Elena Katishonok’s family saga Once There Lived an Old Man and an Old Woman. “Indifference” sums up my feelings about that one: I don’t think it’s ever a good sign when I think of reading a book and then think, Hmm, I have some blouses to iron… More likely: Mikhail Butov’s Freedom.

Money, Money, Money: Slapovskii’s Day for Money

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:17:00 +0000

Once upon a time there was a writer named Aleksei Slapovskii who wrote a book called День денег, which we might call Money’s Day or A Day for Money in English. Mr. Slapovskii wrote this novel a long, long time ago, during the nasty 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell apart. The book might not have fulfilled all Mr. Slapovskii’s wildest dreams but it landed him on the Russian Booker Prize shortlist for 2000, a genie-worthy wish for many Russian writers.

A Day for Money takes place in Saratov, a kingdom that’s far, far away from Moscow, and it’s a story about three silly local men: an unemployed guy named Snake, a writer called Writer, and a bureaucrat known as Parfyon. One day, when they’re all a little bored or broke or maybe hungover, they meet up and find a whole lot of money on the street! They immediately do what any men who are bored, broke, or maybe hungover would do: they buy some vodka, cigarettes, and snacks.

But poor Snake, Writer, and Parfyon don’t know what to do with all that money. Spending or investing it would be too easy and real-life for a book that’s written rather like a combination of faux folktale and picaresque so they look at options like giving money (a.k.a. granting wishes, or so they think) to people with difficult lives. If only it were that easy to wave a magic wand and give away thousands of dollars! During the course of Mr. Slapovskii’s story, our trio comes face to face with gritty perils like poverty and alcoholism—not to mention prostitutes, cab drivers, and fellow bureaucrats—but they just can’t seem to make wishes come true with money. Maybe money doesn’t buy happiness after all?

Luckily for Snake, Writer, Parfyon, and this reader, someone rides up in a big steed of a car to save them and take the money off their hands so the book can end after 179.5 pages. And just in time! It’s not that A Day for Money is horribly awful—other than trying too horribly, awfully hard to be funny—it’s just that I feel like I’ve been there, done that with other books (including, alas, others by Slapovskii…) and A Day for Money feels a little too much like a time machine, thanks to its mythology—perceived grotesqueries—of the nineties. It feels to me like a fanciful period piece where the meaning of life is at the dump, there’s nobody to admire, and everything comes with a cost. Like finding money on the street, it feels a little too easy. Alas, so do references to Venedikt Yerofeev’s Москва-Петушки, a whole other type of folktale that’s often known as Moscow to the End of the Line in English. All kinds of fictional people seem to pay homage to Yerofeev through their tendency to drink quickly, an action rooted in the phrase “И немедленно выпил.”

Up next. After the disappointment of A Day for Money, I found far more readerly satisfaction in Valerii Popov’s painfully sad Dance to the Death, where absolutely nobody lives happily ever after.

Image credit: “cash money notes 1” from user darrendean, via sxc.hu.

Happy New Year! & 2012 Highlights

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:25:00 +0000

Happy new year! С Новым годом! I hope 2013 brings you many more Russian books and stories to love, no matter what language you read in. Before moving on to 2013, here are a few highlights from 2012, a year with lots more travel (hence a little less reading!) than I’d expected…

Favorite book by an author I’d already read. Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City (previous post) was one of my favorite books of 2012, a lovely small novel about visiting a city once a month for a year. Danilov’s combination of form and content worked beautifully for me.

Favorite book by an author I’d never read. Marina Stepnova’s Lazar’s Women/The Women of Lazarus (previous post), which was shortlisted for the National Bestseller, Big Book, and Booker awards, winning two third prizes from Big Book. If you’re looking for a family saga with touches of postmodernism and perfectly positioned пошлость, this is your novel.

Favorite book that friends didn’t seem to like. Sure, I described Alexander Ilichevsky’s The Anarchists (previous post) as “lumpy” and, yes, I’ll agree with those of you who think some of the tangents are too long… but I still enjoyed the book very much, thanks to Ilichevsky’s combination of old and new. A perfect book to read on the deck during the summer.

Favorite travel. All of it! Two trips to Moscow, first for the International Congress of Literary Translators then for workshops and the Non/fiction book fair, were, by far, my biggest and best travel surprises of the year. A week in New York for BookExpo America and Read Russia! events was a lot of fun, too, and the American Literary Translators Association conference, in Rochester, NY, was a great time as well, despite the untimely late-night appearance of a bedbug.

What’s coming up in 2013? Top priority is getting rid of an intransigent cold!... Thanks to those trips to Moscow, my bookshelves are more loaded now than they’ve ever been, meaning I have so many reading choices I don’t even know what to say I’m most looking forward to… As for travel, the 2013 ALTA conference will be in Bloomington, Indiana, which I’m especially excited about because a friend and former co-worker from Moscow lives near Indianapolis. I’m also waiting to hear more about a possible Russian translation workshop in England next summer… Beyond all that, the Read Russia! program continues and I have some fun translation projects to work on after the holidays.

Thank you! Most important, a big thanks to all of you for visiting the blog, leaving comments, recommending books, and/or sending me notes and books. I enjoy hearing from you and was glad to see so many of you this year... I hope to see and meet more of you in 2013! Here’s to lots more happy reading in the new year!

Disclosures. The usual. Previous posts that I referenced in this post contain further disclosure information about individual books and relationships.

Up next. Aleksei Slapovskii’s День денег (Money’s Day/A Day for Money) and Valerii Popov’s Плясать до смерти (To Dance to Death). The incredible lightness of reading Olga Lukas and Andrei Stepanov’s Prince Sobakin’s Elixir became too cloying, like trying to make a meal of meringue.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Busybody: Khemlin’s Investigator

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:20:00 +0000

Where to start? A murder. A stabbing that hits the heart. May 18, 1952. Klara Tsetkin Street, Chernigov, Ukraine. The victim is Lilia Vorobeichik. The man sent to investigate the case is Mikhail Tsupkoi. Case closed early, murder solved, pinned on Roman Moiseenko, who’d been romantically involved with Vorobeichik. Moiseenko is dead, suicide.

The book is Margarita Khemlin’s Дознаватель (The Investigator), and Tsupkoi, a decorated World War 2 veteran is the title figure and first-person narrator. I should note that Tsupkoi says he’s a дознаватель, an investigator who doesn’t normally handle serious crimes. But he’s sent to handle the Vorobeichik case on his own because the department’s so busy.

Tsupkoi stays busy, too, continuing to investigate the Vorobeichik case after it’s closed. According to seamstress Polina Laevskaya, Vorobeichik’s friend, there are rumors going around town. People don’t believe Moiseenko did it, and Tsupkoi is accused of trying to keep the story quiet because Vorobeichik was Jewish. And so Tsupkoi spends the rest of the book questioning and requestioning Vorobeichik’s friends, neighbors, and family, including her twin sister Eva. As Khemlin said on Echo of Moscow’s “Book Casino,” Tsupkoi thinks everything can be figured out, calculated (рассчитать is her verb) but this is a story about “безумная любовь,” we’ll call that “crazy love.” And crazy is impossible to calculate. Other factors in this dense, crowded book: more death, a resurrection, births, betrayals and infidelity, theft, matzo, adoption, tailored clothing, knives, and gold.

The Investigator is one of the most complex, absurd-at-the-very-core, and bizarrely rewarding books I’ve read in ages: though I kept reading and reading, hypnotized as Tsupkoi zigged, zagged, clomped, and tromped his way around Chernigov, Oster, and the last decade or so to question and listen, it took more than half the book to realize what Khemlin was up to. I knew all along that the novel was literary fiction with elements of detective novel, soap opera, Jewish history, Ukrainian history, Soviet history, World War 2 history, and more...

But then the book spirals more sharply, drawing Tsupkoi closer and closer to the essence of what went wrong for Lilia Vorobeichik, the other characters, and society. I’ll attempt to explain… Though it’s often difficult to keep track of who’s who in The Investigator—there must be dozens of characters of various ages and importance—the book simultaneously chronicles family life and creates a protocol of an unofficial investigation. The ever-present Big Picture in the background is unrelenting: as Khemlin noted on Echo, the post-war atmosphere in the Soviet Union wasn’t easy. She mentions the doctors’ plot, Zionist conspiracy theories, and the interconnectedness of everyday people. That interconnectedness and the misunderstandings it can create are crucial in The Investigator: everybody knows everybody’s business, yards and houses are close, and Tsupkoi, investigator, is the novel’s chief busybody, reaching, always, for the most personal, hidden truths, which he finally finds at the end of the book. Most important, most of those truths reach, somehow, back to World War 2. One character was a partisan. Another’s children burned. Tsupkoi’s war buddy, Evsei, is in the book, too, and there’s even a bag of gold that includes some fillings. The stories build and build, generating pain and tension that become unbearable by the end of the book. There is a confession. Of sorts. As a review in НГ-Ex Libris notes, given Khemlin’s balance of good and bad, every reader will have an opinion about the punishment side of things; Ex Libris put The Investigator on their list of 25 best fiction and poetry books of 2012.

What fascinated me most about The Investigator was how and how much people talk. Tsupkoi questions and questions and people talk and talk, creating some paradoxes: Tsupkoi is an investigator and the novel’s narrator, but huge swaths are told by other characters, who describe their lives and relationships. They tell stories within stories. But is Tsupkoi a faithful protocol writer and narrator? Who knows? Either way, the book is, as Vladimir Guga’s excellent piece for Peremeny.ru notes, polyphonic, because Khemlin offers up varied voices, including one that’s not audible because its owner can’t speak. (I should also note that Guga thinks Khemlin does well writing the book from a man’s perspective.) No matter how varied the voices, though, the war keeps coming back. As Khemlin said on Echo about Tsupkoi, “Выиграть войну можно. Но как жить потом, не знает никто.” – “It’s possible to win the war. But nobody knows how to live after that.”

I’ve read all Khemlin’s books and translated two of her stories plus an excerpt from Klotsvog so it’s interesting for me to watch how she addresses the war, over and over again, in her fiction. I remember her saying (though I don’t remember where) that she grew up living among the aftereffects of the war and that compels her to write. When I read her collection The Living Line, I wrote that the book’s unconnected novellas seemed to meld into “a mural that feels like a small world: Jewish heritage, settings in Ukraine, and the feel that someone is sitting with you, telling tales.” Now, after four books, I feel as if all Khemlin’s books meld into an even bigger mural that blends the personal and the public, the Jewish and the non-Jewish, telling stories that are individual but universal, where characters often speak in Soviet-era clichés, use dark, dark humor, and describe things nobody should ever experience.

I think what I find most mysterious and, thus, appealing about Khemlin’s writing is that, whether I’m reading or translating, nearly everything (except, perhaps, the occasional “суржик,” a blend of Russian and Ukrainian) feels relatively simple at first, as if I’m reading the barest, most factual of fiction… but then her writing evolves into something more complex as I realize how much history and emotion she packs into her words.

Disclaimers: The usual. Margarita gave me my copy of The Investigator.

Up Next: 2012 year-end post. Then Olga Lukas and Andrei Stepanov’s Prince Sobakin’s Elixir and, most likely, Aleksei Slapovskii’s День денег (Money’s Day)… I started reading Slapovskii, which I liked, but then got sick (again! or relapsed?) so went for the extreme lightness of the Lukas/Stepanov book, a perfect accompaniment to lots of coughing and snow.

Crossing Over: Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 02:04:00 +0000

There’s a certain category of books—including today’s subject, Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad—that are nigh on scary to write about. Voroshilovgrad, which I read in Russian, in Zaven Babloyan’s translation from the original Ukrainian, isn’t just a novel: it’s a wonderfully mind-occupying and mind-bending experience in the form of a first-person narrative from a man, German Korolev, who returns to his childhood places after his brother, proprietor of a service station, goes missing.

Voroshilovgrad crosses, with tremendous grace, back and forth between lyrical dreaminess and brutal nightmarishness, and Zhadan works in lots of absurdity… it’s absurdity of the sort that feels normal in books set in the Former Soviet Union, making everything in Voroshilovgrad feel paradoxically both real and bizarre. There are cornfields, grabby criminals, members of the Штунда/Stunda sect, a bus driver asleep at the wheel, a refugee camp inhabited by nomads wanting to head west, and the most bizarre soccer game I’ve ever read.

When I asked Zaven, who gave me a copy of Voroshilovgrad in September at the Translators Congress in Moscow, if there was anything he wanted to tell readers about the book, here’s what he wrote:

Тому, кто никогда не жил на Востоке Украины, многие сцены должны казаться совершенной фантасмагорией -- а они этнографически точны. Из локального, ностальгического и мистического Жадану, мне кажется, удалось сложить нечто, выражающее уникальные и универсальные чувства -- чувства, какими всегда пропитаны великие истории.

In my not-so-graceful [but with dumb error corrected!] translation:

Many scenes probably seem absolutely phantasmagorical to someone who’s never lived in Eastern Ukraine, but they’re ethnographically accurate. I think Zhadan managed, using the local, the nostalgic, and the mystical, to create something that expresses unique and universal feelings, the sorts of feelings that always permeate great stories/histories.

I see lots of direct connections between Zaven’s comments and the element of the book that stood out most for me: constant crossings of temporal, geographical, national, and state-of-mind boundaries. A favorite example of the latter: German’s sweet, outdoor morning nap is interrupted by an inexplicable warm draft of air, a sensation that he realizes, eyes still closed, emanates from a bus. Of course the bus is an Ikarus that’s arrived to take German and his teammates (and what teammates they are!) to play that bizarre soccer game against a bunch of gas industry workers. This isn’t the first time German rides on an Ikarus, a name that indicates flying, something that’s important here, both literally and metaphorically. Zhadan includes crop dusters, dreams of flight, and a line about childhood ambitions that’s on the cover of my book, “Все мы хотели стать пилотами. Большинство из нас стало лузерами.” (“We all wanted to become pilots. Most of us became losers.”)

There are lots of on-the-ground trips by train and car—and I don’t use the word “trips” lightly: the book feels like “trips” in many ways—in Voroshilovgrad, too, making the novel feel like an extended road trip that harkens back to The Wizard of Oz. There’s even a mention at a funeral of the Yellow Brick Road, plus there are scenes set in cornfields. We’re certainly not in Kansas but the reference to Oz (and/or its rough Russian equivalent) feels perfectly fitting, because of blurry borders between real and imagined.

Postcard-like photo of Kliment
Voroshilov monument in Lugansk:
it (kinda sorta) gets a mention in the novel.

In case you’re wondering, Zhadan doesn’t write much in Voroshilovgrad about Voroshilovgrad, though the city is another example of the local, nostalgic, and mystical aspects of Voroshilovgrad that Zaven mentioned. For one thing, Voroshilovgrad, named for Kliment Voroshilov, a local man with a checkered history, no longer exists because it’s been rerenamed Lugansk (pronounced Luhansk). Voroshilovgrad comes up when German and a woman, Olga, find shelter from the rain in the Lenin room of a children’s camp (now, there’s Soviet myth for you!) where Olga once worked. German mentions that his childhood German teacher used to hand out sets of postcards with scenes from cities, like Voroshilovgrad, that the children had to describe even if they’d never visited. German compares this sort of uninformed description with demands that he live by someone else’s rules, something he’s dealing with in situations related to his brother’s absence.

Later in the book, Olga finds a packet of Voroshilovgrad postcards, saying she bought lots of them years ago to send to a penpal in Germany. Now, she says, the entire episode feels like something from another life, another city, and another country, with completely other people. That’s a lot of crossing over. “Наверное, эти картинки и есть мое прошлое,” she says, meaning “Those pictures probably are my past.” Though Olga says she was supposed to forget this past, she can’t: it’s a part of her, perhaps even the best part.

A bit of background: Voroshilovgrad won BBC Ukraine’s Book of the Year award in 2010. Liza Novikova’s review of Voroshilovgrad for Izvestiia notes that Zaven’s translation is a retranslation (an improvement!), adding that usually only classics are honored with retranslations. Liza also calls Zhadan a cult post-Soviet writer and refers to Voroshilovgrad as a “манифест поколения” (“a generation’s manifesto”).

Also: Zhadan’s “The Owners,” translated by Anastasia Lakhtikova is in Best European Fiction of 2012; the book says the piece is an excerpt from Гімн демократичної молоді (Anthem of Democratic Youth). I enjoyed it, too.

Disclaimers: I know Zaven Babloyan, Liza Novikova, and Anastasia Lakhtikova in my real and virtual lives. Zaven gave me a copy of Voroshilovgrad. It was a great gift: I think his translation reads very nicely, successfully creating a voice able to convey, often at very short notice, the lyricism, humor, and absurdity I mentioned. It was a pleasure to read his work.

Up next: Another book set in Ukraine, Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator, then something else TBD… I’ve brought back so many books from Moscow that I have an embarrassing number of choices! I think I’m leaning toward Valerii Popov’s To Dance to Death, which several friends have praised very highly.

Image Credit: Alex Chupryna, via Wikipedia.

Moscow Trip Report, November-December Snowstorm Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Dmitriev’s Peasant & Teenager Win Russian Booker

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:54:00 +0000

Another week, another big Russian literary prize... Today the Russian Booker went to Andrei Dmitriev for Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager), a book I wrote about last month, here.

I’ve only read half this year’s finalists—Slavnikova’s book, Stepnova’s book, and Dmitriev’s winner—but have to say this choice surprised and disappointed me, and not just because Dmitriev already won a Yasnaya Polyana award in October. The Peasant and the Teenager is a decent enough novel about city and rural life, and I can understand enjoying it. Still, as I wrote in my previous post, I think the book lacks something. That something is, at least for me, intangible and difficult to describe: the book doesn’t manage to give me much new, either thematically or aesthetically, leaving me moderately satisfied but shruggingly indifferent. Despite the cow, my favorite character.

I’ll leave the commentary at that for now and add notes later if I find any interesting reactions. Two days later, these three articles seem to sum up what I've read:

Addition 1: An article from RIANovosti with comments about the award. (NB: They got Stepnova's first name wrong at the top: she's Marina!) I'm posting this because I agree with writer and critic Alisa Ganieva's comment that Dmitriev's book was a safe choice; Ganieva said she would have chosen a winner from the Stepnova, Slavnikova, or Terekhov books. This article also includes a comment from Booker committee chair Igor Shaitanov expressing his pleasure with the choice because the Booker's goal is to try to make serious Russian literature competitive; another article, on Gazeta.ru, has Shaitanov hinting that Dmitriev's book was noted by the prize's English partners and may be translated into English.

Addition 2: A thorough piece from Izvestia by critic Liza Novikova, who (as always!) fits a lot into a brief article. Among other things, Liza calls Dmitriev's novel a continuation of the Soviet-era "village prose" tradition, noting that Dmitriev manages to create a positive character in Paniukov, a rarity in contemporary literature. I agree and think it's one of the book's best aspects. Liza also includes some interesting quotes from finalists Slavnikova and Terekhov, with Slavnikova discussing how her book might have been different if written now and Terekhov saying that if readers see his Germans as social satire, then it must be social satire.

Addition 3: Anna Narinskaia's piece for Kommersant. Among other things, Narinskaia mentions the Booker's apparent trend of moderation (after those scandalous (!) Elizarov and Koliadina wins...), 2012 jury chair Samuil Lur'e's comment that Russian literature died back around, uhm, 1949 sending readers to foreign detective novels, and (writer and jury member) Roman Senchin's response that, essentially, all is not lost. Phew.

Up Next: Moscow trip report with more about the Big Book award, then Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, and Margarita Khemlin’s Investigator. Then who knows… the bookshelf is wonderfully, ridiculously full after this fall’s Moscow trips!

2012 Big Book Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:37:00 +0000

The Big Book awards are scheduled for November 27, when I'll be in Moscow... and plan to go to the Big Book award ceremony. Since I'm traveling light, at least electronically speaking, I'm scheduling this piece to post automatically -- I'll tap in a comment, as Anonymous, late that day/night with the winners. I'll try to remember to take pictures to post later in my trip report!

For everyone's reference, here's the list of finalists:

Maria Galina: Медведки (Mole-Crickets)
Daniil Granin: Мой лейтенант… (My Lieutenant…)
Aleksandr Grigorenko: Мэбэт. История человека тайги(Mebet. The Story of a Person from the Taiga)
Vladimir Gubailovsky: Учитель цинизма (The Teacher of Cynicism)
Andrei Dmitriev: Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager)
Aleksandr Kabakov, Evgenii Popov: Аксёнов (Aksyonov)
Vladimir Makanin: Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky)
Sergei Nosov: Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier)
Valerii Popov: Плясать досмерти (To Dance to Death)
Zakhar Prilepin: Чёрная обезьяна (The Black Monkey)
Andrei Rubanov: Стыдные подвиги (Shameful Feats/Exploits)
Marina Stepnova: Женщины Лазаря (The Women of Lazarus/Lazarus’s Women)
Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov): «Несвятые святые» и другие рассказы (“Unsaintly Saints” and Other Stories)
Lena Eltang: Другие барабаны (Other Drums)

Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:45:00 +0000

Reading Dmitrii Danilov’s latest book, Описание города (Description of a City) was a big, huge literary relief: after enjoying his spare but detailed Horizontal Position and “Black and Green” very much, I’d wondered what he would (or possibly could!) do next. My hope—selfish, of course—was that he would continue writing prose that is impersonal and I-less, but deeply personal... and, somehow, expand into another dimension. Which is exactly what Danilov does, in Description of a City, a book that is both very touching and quietly funny, a book that describes—and, really, defines—a city he visits once a month for a year. Beginning in January.

The narrator in Description of a City catalogues his goals on the first page. A summary: walk around, ride around, look around, stay in hotels, buy things, go from end to end many times, walk the central street and other streets a million times, make the place feel native so it gets under the skin. The city was chosen for its railroad connections and relatively short distance from Moscow (six hours by train), sports teams, wealth of industry, and dearth of tourist attractions. We learn that it’s essentially flyover country: the city’s airport doesn’t have many flights and the narrator sees planes flying overhead.

But my description of Description is off. Danilov uses terms like these, which I’ll translate very literally:

описаемый город –city being described
гостиница, название которой совпадает с названием одного из областных центров Украины – hotel the name of which coincides with the name of one of the regional centers of Ukraine
улица, названная в честь одного из месяцев – street named in honor of one of the months
площадь имени одного из величайших злодеев в мировой истории – [city] square named for one of the greatest villains in world history

Part of what makes this nomenclature work is that the place names start to pile up when the narrator goes from one train station to another, crosses a certain street, or sees a certain building. This sometimes creates absurdly long lists of names-that-don’t-name that might not seem to mean much. But they become names for us, Description’s readers, and they do have meaning—a lot of very marked meaning—even for a foreigner. I know, for example, the habit of naming hotels after other cities from the FSU, I know there are lots of Russian streets named after October, and I know Lenin and Marx are still pretty popular on Russian maps.

The cumulative effect of all those names-that-aren’t-names surprised me. Not only did I create a vivid mental picture of an imaginary city that drew on all my travel—in the years I lived in Russia I went to lots of small cities not unlike Danilov’s—but the city being described began to feel like a mythical, almost mystical place thanks to all the descriptions of names that draw on Soviet-era figures and clichés. Danilov has been called a new realist but his realism is a very particular and peculiar realism. His realism is abstract and almost transcendent, a realism with a lot of остранение, defamiliarization.

Danilov discusses words in other ways throughout the book, asking, for example, about the use of the word ритуальный (ritual) instead of похоронный (burial) when discussing funeral services. I’ve always thought this was strange, too. Also: can a wooden square that is obviously intended for use as a sandbox be called a “sandbox” if it contains no sand? And he wonders, throughout the book, about the expression “войти в печенки,” something the city being described should do to him, though he doesn’t quite grasp the expression. I don’t quite grasp the expression, either: literally it’s apparently “get into your livers” (!) and the Oxford Russian-English dictionary has the translation “to plague (someone)” for when something is, in Russian, in your livers. To me it feels a lot like “get under the skin.” In any case, at the very end of the book Danilov wraps things up nicely, saying there’s no longer any sense in talking about getting into livers. “Надо назвать вещи своими именами,” he says. Meaning his narrator is feeling compelled to call things by their true names so ‘fesses up: I don’t think it gives away anything at all to add that he says he has come to love that city… and of course the confession doubles as the narrator’s explanation of the livers expression.

So, yes, Description of a City got under my skin and into my livers, too, thanks to Danilov’s wonderful pile-ups of names that sometimes feel poetic, hours spent sitting on benches at train stations, on seats of buses, on seats at stadiums. The contrast of movement and transportation with open expanses and a meditative state I’ve come to expect from Danilov is also lovely. Most of all, though, I appreciate how Danilov uses language to deconstruct urban naming and describe a city that readers can build—one generic, clichéd name or building at a time—into imagined cities that draw on memories of real places and Soviet myths his readers already know. It’s quite a nice trick.

The train station known as
City Being Described-1.

P.S. In case anyone wonders what city served as the model for the city being described, it’s Bryansk, something Danilov told me before I read the book, though I decided not to look at photos until finishing my reading. One reason Danilov chose Bryansk: his tremendous respect for Leonid Dobychin, a writer who lived in Bryansk. Of course Dobychin isn’t mentioned by name—he’s “выдающийся русский писатель” (an eminent Russian writer)—but Description of a City mentions monthly visits to the empty lot where Dobychin’s house once stood. It is, writes Danilov, on a street named in honor of one of the months, though the month is neither January or February. As I said, the book got into my livers.

Disclaimers: Danilov gave me a copy of Description of a City when I saw him in Moscow earlier this fall.

Up Next: Vorishilovgrad from Serhij Zhadan, which I swear I will finish writing about one/some day soon! Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator. And the Big Book award.

Image credit: Leonid Dzhepko, Creative Commons, via Wikipedia.

City/Country: Dmitriev’s The Peasant and the Teenager

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:40:00 +0000

Andrei Dmitriev’s Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager), which won the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” Yasnaya Polyana award last month and is also on the short lists for this year’s Big Book and Russian Booker prizes, is a novel composed of two intersecting character sketches. Dmitriev draws his two title characters in great detail: middle-aged Paniukov, an Afghan war veteran who lives in a Russian village, and teen aged Gera, a Muscovite who comes to stay with Paniukov to avoid military service. They are brought together by Vova, an old friend and former farming partner of Paniukov’s who now lives in Moscow.

Though I didn’t count pages or scenes, it felt to me that Dmitriev offered more backstory for the men—often about their not-so-happening relationships with women—than present-day interaction. In the beginning of the book, Paniukov still thinks about his youthful romance with Sanya, whom he sees around town, and Gera is madly in love with Tatiana, who’s in Moscow and difficult to reach by cell phone. There’s no cell signal in the village—this is my kind of place!—so he has to travel to call her. I didn’t find much of interest in either romantic plot line, both of which take up lots of pages, rehashing stories of love and loss that I’ve heard, read, and witnessed elsewhere. I didn’t find much of interest in the interactions between Paniukov and Gera, either; Dmitriev didn’t develop their differences as much as I’d expected.

Still, I never thought about abandoning the book. The Peasant and the Teenager is readable thanks to Dmitriev’s writing and his ability to create texture in the settings and secondary characters—including a cow—that surround Paniukov and Gera. The texture doesn’t always feel very new to me, either, but Dmitriev combines elements to create atmosphere, particularly in the village, that feels real, if only in a schematic way. He gives us villagers who speak only in the informal you (ты) to emphasize closeness, English-influenced slang and poor spelling, a contrast of urban and rural bathhouses, walks that don’t quite go into the woods, illegal wood cutting, and a group of hunters who stay with Paniukov and Gera. As the designated drinker of the pair (Paniukov is a teetotaler), Gera has vodka with the hunters, revealing himself a buzzkill by talking too much about Suvorov. Dmitriev also has Paniukov tell stories of unpleasant village fates: they begin to feel identical and dull to Gera, who’s been through a bit himself because his brother is a drug addict abandoned by his family.

I came away from The Peasant and the Teenager with mixed feelings. On the minus side, the novel felt a bit awkward—not quite finished (or connected?) and not quite the right length—and I prefer a book with more conflict between characters. Dmitriev raised expectations that he’d reveal more about Paniukov and Gera than their been-there-read-that love stories could show. On the positive side, all the details I described above made this medium-length book perfectly pleasant to read, particularly given supporting characters like Lika, who changes her hair color to stave off boredom, and Paniukov’s expressive cow. I give Dmitriev extra credit for the cow, who became my favorite character: it’s a rare book where I want to read more about a cow who’s at the center of everything in a place without a cell signal.

Disclosures: The usual. Dmitriev shares an agent with two writers I’ve translated.

Up Next: Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad and Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City.

NOSE Finalists, 2012-2013

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 21:35:00 +0000

The NOSE Award named its [somewhat curious] list of finalists last week… here they are listed in Russian alphabetical order:

Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina: Маленький человек (A Little Man), “a social novel with a detective [novel] plot,” according to the publisher’s description on Ozon.ru. Update on November 17, 2012: This book was also shortlisted for the 2012 Debut Prize for long fiction.
Lora Beloivan: Карбид и амброзия (Carbide and Ambrosia), a short story collection.
Sergei Gandlevskii: Бездумное былое (something like Feckless Bygone Days, though I almost missed the д and made this into Insane Bygone Days, an easier title to deal with, really…), a memoir about everything from family history to political protest in 2011.
Mikhail Gigolashvili: Захват Московии (The Capture of Muscovy), a novel that a couple friends have enjoyed, though one said it’s not nearly as good as The Devil’s Wheel… then again, Gigolashvili set ridiculously high standards for himself with The Devil’s Wheel and The Interpreter.
Georgii Davydov: Крысолов (The Rat Catcher), a novel that’s also on this year’s Booker short list.
Nikolai Kononov: Бог без машины. История 20 сумасшедших, сделавших в России бизнес с нуля (God Without a Machine [or, heaven forbid, God Without a Car?]. The History of 20 Crazy People Starting Businesses in Russia from Nothing), nonfiction where the second part of the title seems to explain a lot more than the first. At least to me.
Aleksei Motorov: Юные годы медбрата Паровозова (Male Nurse Parovozov’s Young Years), an autobiographical novel that Ozon readers have loved. This one sounds like very decent mainstream.
Oleg Rashidov: Сколково. Принуждение к чуду (Skolkovo. Necessity for a Miracle), another business-themed book, this one about the Skolkovo Innovation Centre.
Lev Rubinshtein: Знаки внимания (Signs of Attention), a collection of columns from various publications and various years.

There’s a lot of nonfiction in that list but, as of this writing, fiction leads the online voting: Male Nurse Parovozov is first with 559 votes, followed by The Rat Catcher with 408 and Carbide and Ambrosia with 273.

Up Next: Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, Andrei Dmitriev’s The Peasant and the Teenager, Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City…

Trip Report! American Literary Translators Association Conference, Early October 2012, Rochester, NY

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Hayden Espenschade) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 22:01:00 +0000

Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, which looks ready to windily, rainily slither around us nearly all week (!), I’m so distracted today that I’m glad I wrote up my summary of the American Literary Translators Association conference a couple weeks ago. This was my second ALTA conference: ALTA has quickly become a favorite element in my fall calendar thanks to the ever-welcome combination of приятное с полезным/business with pleasure. Here are some highlights:

I started off ALTA 2012 with “Translation Challenges in Modern Russian Prose,” in which John Givens spoke of translating Vasily Shukshin with Laura (Michael) Givens and addressed the vexing question “Do Russian Peasants say ‘Ain’t’?” as he discussed “deformed Soviet speech,” something that seems to hold inordinate power over me, too. Will Evans then talked about potential uses of intertextuality and interactivity for/with/in his translation of Oleg Kashin’s Роисся вперде (Fardwor, Ruissa!) and Carol Apollonio looked at some particularly difficult passages and words in German Sadulaev’s Таблетка (The Mayan Pill), a book she said includes invented language and a demonic possession theme. The session highlighted one of my favorite aspects of ALTA: panelists’ candor about their projects and Difficult Moments in Translation.

The second time slot presented a scheduling dilemma: I choose the “Linguistics & the Culture of Humor” panel over “Translating Poetry: In & Out of Slavic Languages,” missing, alas, several colleagues, because I was so interested in hearing Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson speak about their work on Ilf and Petrov’s The Golden Calf: I interviewed them for the blog a few years ago. Gurevich did most of their speaking (Anderson had been sick), mentioning technical things like translating (or not) names and bits of verse in The Golden Calf, general things that make humor work—I couldn’t agree more that the element of surprise is key—and the Gurevich-Anderson team’s translation of Pavel Sanaev’s Похороните меня за плинтусом (Bury Me Behind the Baseboard), a book featuring an unbalanced grandmother. The other panelists were fun(ny), too... and you can read more about humor and ALTA in Jascha Hoffman's essay in last week’s New York Times Book Review.

I took part in the bilingual reading program on the afternoon of Day One, reading the first several sections/languages in my translation of Vladislav Otroshenko’s “Языки Нимродовой башни” (“The Languages of Nimrod’s Tower”)—I’m grateful to the audience for their sense of humor! This was a Slavic languages bloc(k), so I’ll list all the other readers: Robin Davidson with poems by Ewa Lipska (Poland), Magdalena Mullek with prose by Lukás Luk (Slovakia), and Danuta Borchardt with poems by Cyprian Norwid (Polish). Marian Schwartz led off the session, reading the beginning of her translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s Венерин волос (Maidenhair), out this month from Open Letter Books, based at the University of Rochester. Chad Post, publisher at Open Letter, also interviewed Marian at the very end of the conference. Marian read chunks of the book again and spoke, among other things, about Maidenhair’s subtexts (e.g. Agatha Christie) and Shishkin’s help—provided in the form of extensive notes and a full review—in translating this wonderfully, crazily complex book. I just have to say: Shishkin is truly a force of nature! I missed a bit of Marian’s talk to run across the hall and hear Jamie Olson read his very enjoyable translations of poetry by Timur Kibirov in the bilingual reading program.

¡Declamación!—the reading and/or singing of memorized verse—is another ALTA highlight. I recited a poem from Konstantin Vaginov’s Bambocciade, in the original and in my translation. I’m only an accidental poetry translator but have to admit it can be ridiculously fun to piece together something with rhythm and rhyme. And I’ll say this again: memorizing a poem to recite is a very useful exercise. Now I can recite poems in Russian when people ask, as happens more often than you might think, to hear some Russian. Other Russian declaimers: Marian recited a beautiful passage from Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Нездешний вечер” (“An Otherworldly Evening”) and Sibelan Forrester sang a baleful wedding song. Sibelan’s translation of Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale came out in September.

Getting beyond Russian themes, highlights included: A fun panel moderated by Jamie Olson on work habits, in which translators talked about getting up painfully early to translate, working in public places using documents stored in the cloud, carrying around lines of poetry to translate, dread and deadlines, and “bulldozing” up a first draft. Some translators tell me they use far more electronic resources than old-fashioned reference books printed on paper so I felt less like a Luddite when Bill Johnston said he uses no online dictionaries and Russell Valentino mentioned having lots of books open at the same time. I make frequent use of online dictionaries and Google Images but find the paper stuff so useful in a mysterious way—zoning out while gazing at definitions and synonyms on paper is a strangely fruitful act for me—that I’ve been thinking about how to add another surface around my desk so I can have more room for (open) books… In a marketing panel, Matvei Yankelevich mentioned that The Overlook Press has reprinted his collection of Daniel Kharms stories, Today I Wrote Nothing, in an Ardis edition… A session on music and musicality in translation focused mostly on poetry, and it was a treat to hear Carolyn Tipton, Stephen Kessler, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Roger Greenwald talk about and read from their work… Finally, I loved panels on authorisms and stylistics: I seem to be drawn to fussing over quirks rooted in Russian’s structure and/or writers’ neologisms and linguistic tics, particularly the afore-mentioned “deformed Soviet speech,” so enjoyed hearing about reader tolerance levels (Russell Valentino), dialogue tags (Elizabeth Harris), removing “it” when “it” is a “dummy subject” (Bill Johnston), and translating Heinrich von Kleist (Christiane Eydt-Beebe).

For more:

The program for the conference is online, in PDF format, here.
Jamie Olson blogged about ALTA on The Flaxen Wave here.
Susan Bernofsky has posts about ALTA on Translationista here and here; the second post was written by translator Bill Martin.
I’ll add more links later, when they’re available: Open Letter recorded many sessions that will be posted online.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, Andrei Dmitriev’s The Peasant and the Teenager, and then more 2012 Big Book finalists.