Author Archives: mbs

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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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