The Ties of Blood
Russian Literature from the 21st Century
Edited by Oliver Ready
Poetry edited by Emily Lygo
144 pp., £10
ISBN 978-1-905345-04-5
The list of contemporary Russian authors widely available in English is small and has altered little in recent years: Pelevin, Ulitskaya, Akunin, Tolstaya, Sorokin. Yet these authors, who have been well-established at home and abroad for a decade or more, represent only a fragment – albeit a very visible fragment – of the Russian literary scene. The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from the 21st Century will offer the English reader and publisher the opportunity to sample a far greater variety of the prose-writers and poets shaping Russian literature today. Virtually unknown over here, they are, in many cases, renowned in their homeland.
Among the entries are short stories by Dmitry Novikov, German Sadulaev, and Aleksandr Ilichevsky (the most recent recipient of the Russian Booker Prize), and excerpts from recent novels by Aleksei Ivanov, Dina Rubina, and Aleksei Slapovsky. The collection ranges from Uzbekistan to Chechnya, from the experiences of a literary hack in the post-Soviet Moscow of glamour and celebrity to the lives of rafters on the Chusovaya River in the eighteenth century. If a common thread can be discerned, it is the persistence of the eternal theme of kinship: sibling rivalries, generational conflicts, and ancestral memory. No less striking than the topics are the style and formal composition of the pieces included, as writers all across Russia attempt to create a fresh literary context in the wake of both Soviet optimism and post-Soviet cynicism.
Rather like the authors themselves, the translators are a mixture of the established and the emerging, with several having already been acclaimed by the judges of Rossica’s sister project, the Rossica Translation Prize.
This volume is planned as the first in a series of anthologies of contemporary Russian literature to be published by Academia Rossica.
Contents
‘Like a Tree Growing Backwards’: Contemporary Prose Between Past and Present
Introduction by Oliver Ready
Heirs of the Tradition: The Private Experience of Poetry in Today’s Russia
Introduction to Poetry by Emily Lygo
Petrovich (extract)
Oleg Zaionchkovsky
The Gold of the Rebellion (extract)
Aleksei Ivanov
Two Poems by Andrei Rodionov
On the Sunny Side of the Street (extract)
Dina Rubina
Four Poems by Alexei Tsvetkov
I am Chechen! (extract)
German Sadulaev
3 July 2004
A Poem by Maria Stepanova
The Toads of Revenge and Conscience
Dmitry Novikov
Poems by Maria Galina
Quality of Life (extract)
Aleksei Slapovsky
Three Poems by Boris Ryzhii
The Waxen Yonder and The Passing of the Shade
Irina Polyanskaya
The Sparrow
Aleksandr Ilichevsky
Two Poems by Maxim Amelin
Boris Pasternak, A Biography (extract)
Dmitry Bykov
The Raising of Lazarus
Vladimir Sharov
Poetry Texts in Russian
Translators
Rather like the authors of this volume, the translators are a mixture of the established and the emerging, with several having already been acclaimed by the judges of the Rossica Translation Prize.
Galya Aplin has taught Russian in the Foreign Office and at the universities of Leeds, St Andrews and London. Hugh Aplin is Head of Russian at Westminster School, London, and has twice been shortlisted for the Academia Rossica Translation Prize.
Andrew Bromfield, a founding editor of the journal Glas, is best known for translating Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin. He has also translated Zinovy Zinik, Dmitry Bakin, Mikhail Kononov, Vladimir Shinkarev, the Strugatsky brothers, Irina Denezhkina and others. He has been short-listed for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Translation Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Sasha Dugdale is the author of two collections of poetry, Notebook (2003) and The Estate (2007). She translates poetry and drama from Russian. Her recent translations include a collection of poems by Elena Shvarts, Birdsong on the Seabed (2008), and Chekhov's Cherry Orchard for BBC Radio.
Jamey Gambrell lives in New York, and writes on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose essays Earthly Signs; Alexander Rodchenko’s writings, Experiments for the Future, and stories, essays and a novel, The Slynx, by Tatyana Tolstaya. Most recently, she translated Vladimir Sorokin's Ice, the first book of the trilogy 23,000.
Anna Gunin is a translator and legal interpreter who graduated from Bristol University. She lives in rural Somerset with her Russian husband and son. An occasional contributor to the BBC Russian Service, she has co-translated the film Dust and her translations of poems and stories have appeared in literary journals. She is currently translating German Sadulaev’s I Am a Chechen!
Daniel M. Jaffe, a prize-winning American fiction writer, is author of the novel, The Limits of Pleasure, is compiler-editor of With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, and translator of the novel Here Comes the Messiah! by Dina Rubina. Over a hundred of his short stories, essays, and short translations have been published in the U.S. and elsewhere. His website is http://danieljaffe.tripod.com
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on cultural history, including, most recently, Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, and has translated a variety of Russian prose and poetry, including Tsvetaeva,
Mayakovsky, Elena Shvarts, and Olga Sedakova (in, for example, Utopias, 1999)
Angela Livingstone is Research Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She has published books and articles on Russian prose and poetry – mainly twentieth-century and concentrating on the works of Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrei Platonov – as well as numerous translations of work by these writers.
Emily Lygo is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter and specialises in twentieth-century Russian poetry. She studied Russian at the University of Oxford and received her doctorate in 2005. She has also translated the contemporary Russian poet Tatiana Voltskaia (Bloodaxe, 2006).
Benjamin Paloff is assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a poetry editor forBoston Review. His most recent translations are Dorota Masłowska's Snow White and Russian Red (Grove Press, 2005) and Marek Bieńczyk's Tworki (Northwestern University Press, 2008).
Oliver Ready is a Junior Research Fellow in Russian literature at Wolfson College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2006, explores the late-Soviet ‘praise of folly’ in the prose of Venedikt Erofeev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Yury Mamleev, Dmitry Galkovsky, and others. His translations include The Prussian Bride by Yuri Buida, for which he received the inaugural Rossica Translation Prize in 2005.
Sergei Roy (b. 1936): linguist, journalist, writer, and translator. Published numerous works on theoretical linguistics. Translated into English over 60 books – poetry, prose, scholarly works. Editor of Moscow News for ten years, also of Moscow Magazine, intelligent.ru, guardian-psj.ru. Published many short stories, the tale Taiga Law in Russian and English, and the novel Solo on the Aral in Russian.
G.S. Smith is Professor Emeritus of Russian in the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of New College. His book-length translations of Russian poetry include the works of Aleksandr Galich, Boris Slutsky, and Lev Loseff, and Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1993).
Note to Publishers
Unless otherwise noted, copyright on the English language translation of each story and poem belongs to the translator.
Information on translation rights for the novels featured in this anthology has been given where available. Publishers and translators desiring further essential information on any of the featured poets and prose-writers are welcome to write to the editors at the following address:
rossica@academia-rossica.org
