Translation

For me, the process of learning a new language is intimately intertwined with the practice of translation from the very beginning. Ever since I began reading and listening to Russian poetry (which I likewise started doing in the very early stages of learning the language), I have been driven to find ways to transport the melodies, rhythms, and textures of the Russian lines into English, thereby enriching my native language and going some distance, at least, toward mending the gap between the two linguistic, cultural, and poetic worlds I inhabit. (Indeed, it is fitting that the etymology of the word translation/перевод, in both Russian and English, equates the traversing of disparate languages with traversing a physical separation.)

I made my first serious translations of Russian poems during my heady first experience of life in late-Soviet Moscow — the period when I began to delve into Russian poetry in earnest: two poems by the Romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev and two by the Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova took shape sometime in the spring of 1990. Soon afterwards, I discovered my life-long affinity for the verse of the incomparable Modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva (who also became the subject of my PhD dissertation and my first scholarly book) and began translating her too. I never stopped. 

Since then, I have translated the poems of a wide range of Polish and Russian poets as I have honed my craft, but I have always returned to the work of Tsvetaeva, whose voice has entered deeply into both my hearing and my soul. I am thrilled now to have the honor of compiling a book-length collection of Tsvetaeva's verse in my translation, which is currently under consideration by Northwestern University Press. This project was awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in January 2022.

Meanwhile, I began learning Ukrainian intensively two years ago, and this beautiful, melodic, powerful new language now occupies the central place in my translation endeavors and plans for the future. In November 2022 Literary Hub published my translation of Ukrainian national bard Taras Shevchenko's important long poem "The Caucasus," and I am currently working on a translation of Anatolii Dimarov's 1960s novel And There Will Be People.