Contemporary Translation in Transition: Poems, Theories, Conversations

by Maria Khotimsky (Editor), Friederike Reents (Editor), Henrieke Stahl-Schwaetzer (Editor), William Waters (Editor)

Overview

This book investigates the hybrid, multiform nature of contemporary poetry with particular emphasis on recent Russian lyric and its translations into German and English. Poetry translation, thriving and obstinately open-ended, is not so much a defined process as a practice of ongoing transit across linguistic and national borders. The book’s innovative format invites contemporary poets into dialogue with literary translators, editors, publishers, and scholars; the conversations among their wide-ranging essays, poems, and exchanges both model and investigate the work of transcultural dialogue. As a kind of transition, poetry translation engages the composition and disintegration of forms, revises relations of producers to receivers, mixes and rethinks genres and media, translates itself as multilingual writing or language experiment. Multiple translations of a poem do not compete but interact, reshaping the putative gulf between source and target language. In the end this volume underscores the aesthetic productivity of poetry translation and the need to nurture it. A must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic interplay of poetry, language, and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887195742
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Series:	Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Maria Khotimsky is Senior Lecturer in Russian in the Global Languages Department at MIT. She is the co-editor of The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention (2019) and Olga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (2017). Her research interests include literary translation, content-based language pedagogy, and translingual poetry.

Friederike Reents is Full Professor in German Literature in German Department at Eichstätt University  She is the co-editor of Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht – Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (Lyrikforschung. Neue Arbeiten zur Theorie und Geschichte der Lyrik, Bd. 1) (2021) and Lyrik und Erkenntnis (2019). Her research interests include lyricology, environmental humanities, and literary translation.

Henrieke Stahl-Schwaetzer is Professor of Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Trier and Executive Editor of the International Journal of Comparative Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on Russian symbolism, philosophy, and poetry. She is author of the monograph Sophia in the Thought of Vladimir Solov’ev: An Aesthetic Reconstruction.

William Waters teaches German & Comparative Literature and Translation at Boston University. He is the author of Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address and numerous essays on poetics and on Rilke. He serves on the board of the Internationale Rilke-Gesellschaft, and co-founded the International Network for the Study of Lyric (lyricology.org).

Maria Khotimsky is Senior Lecturer in Russian in the Global Languages Department at MIT. She is the co-editor of The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention (2019) and Olga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (2017). Her research interests include literary translation, content-based language pedagogy, and translingual poetry.

Friederike Reents is Full Professor in German Literature in German Department at Eichstätt University  She is the co-editor of Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht – Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (Lyrikforschung. Neue Arbeiten zur Theorie und Geschichte der Lyrik, Bd. 1) (2021) and Lyrik und Erkenntnis (2019). Her research interests include lyricology, environmental humanities, and literary translation.

Henrieke Stahl-Schwaetzer is Professor of Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Trier and Executive Editor of the International Journal of Comparative Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on Russian symbolism, philosophy, and poetry. She is author of the monograph Sophia in the Thought of Vladimir Solov’ev: An Aesthetic Reconstruction.

William Waters teaches German & Comparative Literature and Translation at Boston University. He is the author of Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address and numerous essays on poetics and on Rilke. He serves on the board of the Internationale Rilke-Gesellschaft, and co-founded the International Network for the Study of Lyric (lyricology.org).

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Theoretical Considerations: Affect, Stimmung, and Identity in Translation

Conversation 1: Of Fraus and Chechens: Translating Voice and Ear

Iain Galbraith and Ainsley Morse 

 

Stimmung in Translation: On the Translatability of an Aesthetic Category

Friederike Reents

The Embodied Translator: Lifewriting, Affect, and the Act of Translation

Lyn Marven

Nika Skandiaka and the Poetry of Translation  

Stephanie Sandler

Conversation 2: United Space

Uljana Wolf and Eugene Ostashevsky 

                   

II. Transition: Boundaries and Resistance in Translation

Realm of Resistance: Poetry in Central European Regional Languages and the Limits of Machine Translation

Matthias Fechner

Translation in Transition: Vera Pavlova’s Nebesnoe zhivotnoe (1997) and Its Translations, The Heavenly Animal and Das Himmlische Tier (2021)

Rainer Grübel

Joseph Brodsky in English Autotranslation and in German Heterotranslation: A Comparison 

Adrian Wanner

Conversation 3: Institutional Cultures of Translation 

Dmitry Kuzmin and Matvei Yankelevich 

III. Transformation: Poetological and Cultural Change in Translation

Nataliia Azarova’s Project Du Fu: Transcultural Translation as Poetic Innovation

Christian Soffel and Henrieke Stahl

Anna Glazova as Translator of Paul Celan

Alexandra Tretakov

Translation and Translingualism in the Works of Contemporary Russophone American Poets

Maria Khotimsky

Conversation 4: On Translating and Being Translated

Anna Glazova and Polina Barskova

Coda

The Return of the Non-Native

Eugene Ostashevsky

Author biographies

Editorial Reviews

Combining conversations between authors and translators, translator reflections, and scholarly investigations of poetic translations, often capitalizing on the hybrid "identities" of many of the contributors, as poets, translators and scholars, this volume offers a refreshing diversity of approaches and writing styles while also underscoring the close, even vital, connection between translation theory and practice. The volume will appeal to students and scholars in a number of academic fields, general readers interested in poetry, and, of course, to working translators.”

—Brian James Baer, author of Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature

 

“What does a literary translator do? Ventriloquize? Overhear? Productively forget? In this inspired new collection of essays and intellectual dialogues, Khotymsky, Reents, Stahl-Schwaetzer, and Waters have bought together scholars, poets, translators, and editors to discuss the differences, likenesses, and coincidences that make language into art. This collection takes as its subject a handful of writers who push the boundaries of language, as told by those translators and scholars who are their closest interlocutors. The Central-East European focus creates the possibility of cross-border conversations, but the linguistic issues will ring true for translators of any language. To read this book is to listen in at the edges of language and poetics.”

—Amelia Glaser, Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

 

“A collective feat of vision. Contemporary Translation in Transition is a genre-bending work of scholarship and creativity that permits translation to dwell ‘in transit,’ undomesticated, with no fixed residence. The volume emerges, pointedly, from in-person happenings and virtual explorations, from transnational networks and from the never-really-solitary experiences of translators at work. Situating their volume as ongoing dialogue, the editors and contributors perform the vertiginous art of letting poetry speak across the gaps. Their productive dislocations challenge us to become new readers.”

— Martha Kelly, Vice President of Scholarly Programs, National Humanities Center

 

“Translation is an art, a practice, and a vocation. Contemporary Translation in Transition treats all of these dimensions of translation in an innovative format that includes scholarly investigations as well as conversations involving eminent translators, poet-translators, publishers, and scholars. Although contemporary Russian poetry constitutes a shared point of reference in almost all of the materials presented here, attention wanders productively across linguistic and historical barriers, as is only appropriate for a volume on translation. What is more, contemporary translation is shown in all of its border-crossing instability—as a practice in transformation in a post-monolingual, globalized yet belatedly renationalizing world. This is a volume that reflects in cardinal fashion on our own moment: on the urgency, the ubiquity, the need for, and the difficulty of translation.”

—Professor Kevin M. F. Platt, Professor of Russian and East European Studies, the University of Pennsylvania, author of Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders.

“This substantial volume brings together an international cast of creative personalities—poets, scholars, and translators, sometimes all three in one person. Intellectually exciting and aesthetically satisfying, the collection of articles and conversations has a great deal to offer anyone interested in poetry or translation, especially those compelled by both. The essays shift among Chinese, English, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages, addressing a wide variety of topics, including machine translation, the position of small and marginal languages, and the evolution of translation theories and practices. Some of the authors are well-known poets, translators, poet/translators, as well as important scholars. The 2020 conference from which it sprang must have been one hell of a conversation; now readers can reap the insights.”

— Sibelan Forrester, Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian, Swarthmore College

From the Publisher