• Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Lermontov. Her two most recent book translations are Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard (Yale University Press) and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press), soon to be out in paperback from Yale University Press. Overlook Press will publish her translation of Olga Slavnikova's 2017 in March 2010. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Humor in the Human Condition

On the occasion of Yale University Press’s paperback edition of Oblomov, Katherine A. Powers has a glowing review in the Boston Globe:

The expression “great comic novel” attached to a title usually causes me to drop everything and rush off to the library to secure what I consider to be one of the prime reasons for living. The greatest of these works are, to my mind, ones that are not simply funny, but also possess a melancholy, even hopeless dimension. Examples are Charles Portis’s “Masters of Atlantis,” V.S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas,” Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman,” Dawn Powell’s “The Wicked Pavilion,” Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” Molly Keane’s “Good Behavior,” Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust,” Anthony Burgess’s “The Long Day Wanes,” and Shchedrin’s “The Golovlyov Family” - which has also been called the gloomiest novel in all Russian literature.

Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov,” published in Russian in 1859, is invariably described as a “great comic novel.” Still, though I’ve taken it out of the library several times in explosions of enthusiasm, I had never actually read it until now - two versions, in fact: C. J. Hogarth’s translation of 1915, the first in English, which turns out to be an abridgement; and the most recent translation, Marian Schwartz’s of 2008, just published in paperback (Yale University Press, $16.95).

To read the complete review, click here.

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Slavic Professor Reviews White Guard

I was thrilled to read a very positive review of my translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard by Sidney Eric Dement of the University of Kansas in the Slavic and East European Journal.  He begins:

In the course of their life in translation, the best novels shed their skin more than once. The time for Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard has been long overdue. Marian Schwartz’s excellent translation of Bulgakov’s early novel is both timely and elegant, preserving the shape, texture, and richness of the original text.

And in conclusion:

Schwartz sustains careful attention to detail throughout the whole of the translation project. She faithfully reproduces the bewildering kaleidoscope of detail that makes White Guard both difficult and intriguing, capturing the ornamental imagery, tone, pacing and phrasing of the original. Marian Schwartz’s new translation of White Guard treats Bulgakov’s work honorably and performs a great service to Bulgakov’s present and future readers.

For the full review, see Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 53, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 680-681.

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Upcoming Workshop on One Small Piece of the Translator’s Craft

In less than a couple of weeks—Saturday, March 20, in fact--I’ll be giving a workshop on literary translation for the Center for the Art of Translation and the Northern California Translators Association, focusing on some of the nuts and bolts of the profession and demonstrating the process with a passage from Federico Sorrentino’s “Habits of the Artichoke.”

Two Lines, the CAT blog, has posted a piece giving a taste of my demo here.

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The Translator’s Toolkit

Ahead of the workshop I’m giving for beginning literary translators at the Center for the Art of Translation and the Northern California Translators Association in San Francisco on March 20, I made this contribution to CAT’s Translator’s Toolkit series, which appears on their blog, Two Words:

A few years ago I attended ATA’s national conference—not a regular stop on my annual rounds—specifically to hear and meet Michele Berdy, an American expat who has lived in Moscow for decades and who writes a fine column for The Moscow Times explicating Russian vocabulary, idioms, and usage for English speakers. She was giving a workshop and delivering the Slavic Division’s keynote speech. Both performances were stellar, yielding multiple insights and new information but also a fabulous tidbit (assuming tidbits can be fabulous). Berdy told of a CD that collected vast quantities of Russian literature from the eleventh to the early twentieth century. Virtually everything by virtually every writer you ever have and haven’t heard of. And it was searchable.

For the whole article, click here.

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Mining the Human Landscape in Slavnikova’s 2017

image thumb3 Mining the Human Landscape in Slavnikova’s 2017 Lizok’s Bookshelf has run the first review I’ve seen of my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s forthcoming novel, 2017, which Overlook Press is publishing in March:

Olga Slavnikova’s Booker-winning 2017 is so tough to describe that I think I’ll do something very lazy and begin with words that compactly list some of its themes: rock hound, translucence, rubies, Looking Glass (beyond), death, carnival, existentialism, false, genuine, mountain spirits, nature, reality, emptiness, illegal, companionship, revolution, secrets, Bazhov… more

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Praise for Yuzefovich’s Latest

Lisa Hayden Espenschade of Lizok's Bookshelf:  Reading Ideas from Classic and Contemporary Russian Fiction raves about Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Pygmies, which won the 2009 Big Book award—and which she read in the original Russian.  As a bonus, she recommends his story, “The Storm,” which appeared in my translation in Life Stories, a collection from Russian Information Services.

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