Daniel Weissbort

1983, An Annual Survey

Modern Poetry in Translation

Valentina Polukhina

This anthology is the first of its kind, a comprehensive survey of the wealth of poetry written by Russian women since the 1980s. The poets range from founding figures such as Inna Lisnianskaya and Bella Akhmadulina and established writers like Tatyana Shcherbina and Vera Pavlova, to the vibrant generation born after 1970, whose poetry is almost unknown outside Russia. The editors have included biographies of the poets and translators, a bibliography of primary sources and essays by Dmitry Kuzmin and Elena Fanailova.

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets

This anthology, the first of its kind, aims to be comprehensive. Valentina Polukhina surveys the entire scene, reading some 1000 collections and manuscripts, and thoroughly investigating what is accessible on the vibrant Russian literary Internet. The anthology ranges from Moscow to Vladivostok. It includes writers from former Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine. Work by Russian women poets living abroad (in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Israel, etc) is also represented. Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures like Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavolova and Tatyana Shcherbina, the anthology includes work by the youngest generation, born after 1970 and virtually unknown outside Russia, as well as senior poets like Bella Akhmadulina and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Consultants have included scholars, critics and editors, like Dmitry Kuzmin, who created the indispensable poetry website for younger poets, Vavilon. Other consultants in Russia include Olga Sedakova (Moscow State University/MGU), Irina Kovaleva (MGU), and Lyudmila Zbuova (St. Petersburg University). Translators include such distinguished English poets as Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Maura Dooley and Carol Rumens, as well as Russianists and scholars in Britain and the United States such as Peter France (Edinburgh), Catriona Kelly (Oxford), Robert Reid (Keele) and Stephanie Sandler (Harvard). 'Russian poetry is in a healthy state as it leaves the glaciers of Communism for the steamy jungle of western hedonism,' D.M. Thomas declared in Poetry London. The anthology provides a host of insights into post-Soviet reality, from the point of view of women writers who were less compromised by the Soviet system, offering more resistance to the pressures of political conformism.

Seventy contemporary Russian women poets in translation.

Russian Women Poets

Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe

The Poetry of Survival

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

Albert Todd

Max Hayward

A collection of more than eight hundred works by 253 poets reflects the dramatic changes in Russia during the twentieth century

Silver and Steel : an Anthology

Twentieth Century Russian Poetry

Considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Joseph Brodsky (1940â__1996) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. Daniel Weissbort, closely associated with Brodsky as friend and translator, has produced a fascinating biographical (and autobiographical) study, giving particular attention to the problems of "Englishing" Brodsky's poems and Brodsky's relations with English. It is a telling contribution to translation studies and a searching meditation on the nature of language itself.

Joseph Brodsky in English : Pages from a Journal, 1996-97

From Russian with Love

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Periplus means 'the action of sailing round, a circumnavigation; a voyage (or journey) round a coastline, etc.'; in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century account that describes coastal routes from Egypt to India and along East Africa, it is 'a narrative of such a voyage' (OED). Periplus: Poetry in Translation attempts to do both. It sails round or along certain coastlines, some of which might be unfamiliar, and whenever possible it narrates what occurred or did not occur on the journey. A degree of randomness is inevitable in a volume not restricted to any one period or country, and the translation voyages undertaken here range widely. A. K. Ramanujan reworks, from existing materials, the poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri saint-poet Lalla; Weissbort and Musial collaborate to bring over into English the experiment at work of the late Polish poet Miron Bialoszewski; there is a Korean shaman song; Arun Kolatkar's Marathi poems are translated by himself in response to various reading invitations and are gathered here for the first time. In the Introduction to Modern Poetry in Translation: 1983 (MPT), Ted Hughes, looking back on 'the unique tidal wave of poetry translation that swept through English (and through the other chief Western languages) in the sixties and the early seventies', said that many of the translations done at the time now form 'a great series of naturalized poetic monuments'. That tidal wave, at whose crest stood poets like Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Janos Pilinszky, and Yehuda Amichai, was a wholly European affair. Periplus, like MPT, features European poets, but at the same time explores an area hitherto neglected: the versetraditions of the Indian subcontinent. Almost a century into the age of translation, perhaps it is time to see if we cannot have a new balance of poetic power.

Poetry in Translation

Periplus

Ástráður Eysteinsson

Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the Reader demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction. The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by ad verbum versions, to facilitate comparison. The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions to their work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation. This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.

Theory and Practice : a Historical Reader

Translation

Valentina Polukhina is professor emeritus at Keele University. She specializes in modern Russian poetry and is the author of several major studies of Joseph Brodsky and editor of bilingual collections of the poetry of Olga Sedakova, Dmitry Prigov, and Evegeny Rein. Daniel Weissbort is cofounder, along with Ted Hughes, and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and honorary professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Co-editor of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (Iowa 1992), he is also the translator of more than a dozen books, editor of numerous anthologies, and author of many collections of his own poetry. His forthcoming books include a historical reader on translation theory, a book on Ted Hughes and translation, and an edited collection of selected translations of Hughes.

Saadi Simawe

First major collection of modern Iraqi poetry available in the West.

Daniel Weissbort

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