What They're Working On

Russia is the ‘market focus’ of this year’s London Book Fair, one of the largest trade fairs in the publishing world. What can we expect to see from Russian literature in the coming years? We asked six leading literary translators to tell us what they’re working on.

Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

We’re presently at work on a collection of stories by Nikolai Leskov. Leskov was a slightly younger contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and in Russia he is considered virtually their equal. In the West, however, despite numerous translations over the years, he remains largely unknown. His work is extremely difficult to translate, because it is so embedded in Russian speech and the particulars of Russian life, but that also makes for the delight of attempting it. (A small example: ‘Lefty’ is one of the most playful and punning of the stories. In it ‘orderlies’ become ‘odourlies,’ a microscope becomes a ‘meagroscope,’ and the hero asks not to be put on the deck of the ship, ‘or I may get seaccups from the flustrations’). It will be a big collection, probably over 600 pages, including some his most famous pieces (‘The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’), but also quite a few lesser known things (‘Singlemind’, ‘The Spirit of Madame de Genlis’, ‘Deathless Golovan’).

At the same time, we’ve begun a collaboration with the American playwright Richard Nelson, translating Russian plays specifically for stage production. Our first script will be Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have collaborated on translations of over twenty works of Russian literature, of which the most recently published is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

Caroline Walton

I am working on the final draft of my own book, The Besieged: a blend of history and memoir developed from the transcribed (and translated) testimonies of survivors of the 872-day siege of Leningrad. These are interwoven with my own experience of the city and its people. I focused on performers: actors, dancers, musicians – asking how their creativity helped to keep them alive and how it nourished their audiences. Although emotionally gruelling, the process of translating the testimonies was particularly smooth, as my subjects were only too ready to explain concepts I did not understand – such as dystrophy, when the starving body starts to consume itself.

I also translated excerpts from diaries of the period. One diarist, an Orientalist working at the Hermitage, wrote: Somewhere around the 26th and 28th December 1941 I finished an incredibly stupid story… ‘Two Travels to the Big House’. He wrote the last six words in English. Their coded meaning tells us that he was twice called in for interrogation at secret police headquarters. His assumption that the local NKVD would not understand English must have proved correct, because he not only survived the siege: he escaped the gulag and the firing squad too. Perhaps an instance of translation saving a life.

The Besieged by Caroline Walton will be published by Biteback books in September.

Angela Livingstone

I am finishing my translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1927 verse-drama ‘Phaedra’ and three related long poems of hers. When translating poetry, I feel at moments a pleasure which is not like any other and which outweighs all the moments of despair. What is that pleasure? To describe it, I’ve thought of invoking the main image in ‘Attempt at a Room’ (one of the three long poems). This strange work is engaged in creating a room in which to meet another poet, loved but distant. In the course of it, three walls, plus ceiling and floor, are established. In the end they all break down. Yet the strongly constructed poem remains, and with it an inescapable impression that it is itself the desired room – and the meeting is taking place. Similarly, the pleasure felt in the best moments of translating resembles an experience of being with the distant other poet in the carefully constructed ‘room’ of the translation – an experience neither metaphysical nor sentimental.

Angela Livingstone taught literature at the University of Essex for thirty-one years and has translated works by Andrei Platonov, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Arch Tait

My translation of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s prize-laden Daniel Stein, Interpreter has just been published, in time for the Book Fair. Her ‘novel in documents’ tells the real-life story of a Polish Jew who interpreted for the Gestapo and saved hundreds of lives. Another veteran novelist coming to London is Vladimir Makanin, whose novel Underground will be published in English in 2012.

Young writers under 25 are being brought to the Fair by the excellent Debut publishing project, administered by Russian Booker Prize-winner Olga Slavnikova and Natasha Perova of Glas New Russian Writing. Stories by Dmitry Biryukov and Danila Davydov have been snapped up by Dalkey Archive Press and Words Without Borders, and I’m working on a lively neo-Beatnik novella by Irina Bogatyreva. Irina Prokhorova, editor of Moscow’s ground-breaking New Literary Review, is another star whose work will be translated in the coming year.

Arch Tait has translated work by many of today’s leading Russian writers. His website is www.russianwriting.com.

Hugh Aplin

I’ve recently been revising three translations of Russian classics for reissue in the summer: Chekhov’s novella The Story of a Nobody, Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor People, and Tolstoy’s stories ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and ‘The Devil’. I confess to approaching the task with some trepidation, for whenever I look afresh at any of my translations, I invariably see ways in which I think they might have been improved. I wonder whether all translators experience the same nagging doubts and the vague sense of dissatisfaction? However, it all proved less of a trial than I’d feared. Not only are the original works marvellous things to reread in themselves, but it was pleasing to find much that I liked in the translations too. Not that that prevented me from making a hefty number of alterations to all three texts. And now I’m perfectly happy with the results – at least until I come to read the proofs.

Hugh Aplin is Head of Russian at Westminster School. He has been shortlisted for each of the first three Rossica Translation prizes for his translations of Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Ageyev.

Our Russia issue contains fiction by Victor Pelevin and Andrei Platonov; Colin Thubron in Siberia; Vitali Vitaliev on the vodka escape, and more.

More online exclusives on translation: Rowan Ricardo Phillips on translating from Catalan, and Natasha Wimmer on rendering Bolaño’s sex scenes.