This paper approaches modern Russian poetry (twentieth century into the present) through four books of poetry that are outstanding but also representative of the major themes, recurrent techniques, and artistic trends in the tradition over the period.

Chronologically, the first book is Marina Tsvetaeva’s Phedra, a lyric drama on the mythic subject of incestuous love. Practising translation in a broad sense by interpreting classical myth and French neoclassical drama, Tsvetaeva creates her own timeless version in theatrically and linguistically vivid terms that are faithfully matched by Angela Livingstone in a version that is very much its own work of art.

In Holy Winter, Maria Stepanova, whose other works include a great essay on Tsvetaeva, has fashioned a book about exile, contemporary history, imperialism, and love that draws on fables (Hans Christian Anderson, C.S. Lewis), kindred poetic spirits (Ovid, above all), and epistolarity (Ovid’s Heroides, a book of soliloquies by abandoned heroines and Catherine the Great’s love letters). How through a set of constitutive tropes the book maintains its narrative and emotional strength is as much a question as the artistry Stepanova and her translator Alexandra Dugdale bring to bear in creating unity and polyphony.

The third work is Polina Barskova’s Air Raid, published as a bi-lingual work with facing translation by the Belorussian-American poet, Valzhyna Mort. The original title is the English word, gesturing toward the historical and imaginary worlds the poem inhabit, something taken up in the conversation published at the end ‘in lieu of an afterword.’ Air Raid is a book of poems that offers again a different version of the poem as a book. Inspired by the Siege of Leningrad, the poem engages with history/History through an explosion of genres, rewriting prose forms (such as published letters in prose) as verse and martialling multiple techniques of imitation and rewriting—and with all of these the translation keep pace brilliantly, offering its own rewritings of the text.

The fourth and final book is something of a hybrid as Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space is a collection of both her shorter lyrics and her sprawling longer poems. Consumed by the theme of love, adept at confessional lyric in the tradition of the other poets (and inspired by Tsvetaeva’s radical feminism and radical poetics), this collection like the other books also explores cosmic and revolutionary themes, the personal and the historical. But as a selection from three other published collections, it offers a plurality of lyric poems and translators, giving a comparative opportunity to see how diverse hands render a single poet, sometimes in strict form, sometimes more freely; and whether a recognizable Rymbu voice comes across in English.

Sessions will offer a chance:

to consider how translators establish a recognizable voice over a single book collection

to compare and contrast other translations with these versions and consider retranslation

To consider how poets and translators manage bringing in other voices through techniques such as pastiche and quotation

To analyse the structure of the poetic book, the relation of cycles within the book and consider how single lyrics are read, continuously or discontinuously, in relation to the work as a whole

to think about the adaptations and formal compensations translators devise for formal constraints

to think about the different kinds of speech modes to be found in these works such as the soliloquy, dialogue, and song

to write critical commentaries on these translations or other translations

Submissions either an essay or a portfolio of essays of between 5,000 and 7,000

Or

a comparative critical analysis of existing translations between 5,000-7,000 words