On the closing day of the Moscow International Open Book Festival on Tuesday, readers, authors and translators gathered to celebrate the Rossica prize, a literary award for excellence in translation from Russian into English. The prize is given by the Academia Rossica, a London-based arts organization whose sponsors include the British Council. Last year's winner, Oliver Ready, told the packed audience about his bilingual childhood (not Russian-English, as one might have thought, but Italian-English) and his interest in contemporary Russian literature; he has just received a grant from Oxford University to write a major treatise on Russian literature of the last two decades.
This year's winner, Joanne Turnbull, an American translator living in Moscow with her Russian husband (whom she mentioned as her strictest critic and helper), translated a collection of stories by an enigmatic Russian author of the 1930s, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. His works have only recently become known to the Russian public and revealed a talent comparable in magnitude to that of Andrei Platonov or Mikhail Bulgakov. Turnbull's imaginative translation was published by Glas, a small nonprofit Moscow-based publishing house with a mission to bring new or forgotten Russian names to the English-language audience.
Another highlight of the event was the speech made by Anthony Briggs, one of the runners-up in this year's Rossica competition. Far from being sour, he clearly enjoyed telling the audience about his experiences translating Leo Tolstoy's «War and Peace» into English anew. In spite of his excellent Russian, Professor Briggs insisted on speaking in his native language «to give the audience the feeling of what language I used for translation.»
Briggs said he was different from previous translators of Tolstoy's epic on several counts: First, he was a man, while most previous translations were made by women; second, he came from the north of England, where people speak more concisely and energetically; third, he originated from the working class and not from the upper classes as did previous translators. All that, he said, hopefully helped make the text more accessible to modern readers and more direct. The new translation was a huge success, with 30,000 copies sold in Britain alone.
Alexander Livergant, deputy editor of Foreign Literature magazine, suggested that English-to-Russian translators and Russian-to-English translators meet for a joint seminar to discuss the issues of their trade. That's something to look forward to.