The last shelfie on this blog was in June 2017?! Get with the program, Randi. Yeesh. This year has started off pretty well in terms of reading. I really enjoyed The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown, In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (translated by Ann Goldstein), Strangers to the City by Michael Casey, and Standing Up by Kate … Read more
So this spring — to my great excitement and gratitude — I’ve been allowed to sit in on a graduate seminar on translation theory and practice. (EEEEE!) For this week, as a practical exercise, we were to translate a brief Spanish-language poem (actually, a single stanza from a much longer Spanish poem) into English or … Read more
In 1828, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote a short, lighthearted love poem to Anna Olenina, a girl he was pursuing at the time. Almost two hundred years later, that small poem is one of Pushkin’s most well-known and beloved verses. It also has a reputation for causing a particular conundrum for English translations. … Read more
I promised Facebook I would, and so it is done! Presenting a Russian-to-English translation of this brief but beautiful poem by famed Silver Age poet Marina Tsvetaeva: You can listen to a nice reading of it here. I loved this poem as soon as I saw the word рябина (ryabina) — rowan. Besides the Siberian birch, which … Read more
Okay, so, whatever our differences may be, Alexander Pushkin and I have at least this one thing in common: our favorite season is fall. That is, осень, or osen’, in Russian. Let Tyutchev have his spring … what’s not to love about the leaves turning gold, red, and orange — the air turning crisp and … Read more