Subtropics has published my translation of Mark Girshin’s “Seaweed Mattress,” a series of vignettes about a childhood spent in Odessa in the 1910s and 1920s, part of his longer memoir, Mosaic. The title refers to the custom there, on the Black Sea, of stuffing mattresses with seaweed rather than straw. In Anastasia Kozak’s interview with Girshin for the magazine, Girshin says he is currently working on a novel, Genghis Khan with a Telephone, “which was how Nikolai Bukharin referred to Stalin.”
Girshin emigrated to the United States decades ago and has a fine body of work that finds its first US audience with this publication. May he have many more.
Lizok’s Bookshelf (written by Lisa Hayden Espenschade) has posted an interview with me about some recent translations of mine and even a cheerful thought on the future of foreign literature publishing in this country.
Lots of good reviews have come in for my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s “rambunctious” (as Donna Seaman describes it for Booklist) novel, 2017:
Seaman writes one of the most accurate descriptions of the book I’ve read:
Strange things are happening in the rugged Riphean Mountains in this rambunctious novel of Russian society 100 years after the revolution, winner of the Russian Booker Prize. Slavnikova’s imaginary mountains, which resemble the Urals where she grew up, harbor mischievous spirits protecting deep veins of rubies that attract two unlikely rock hounds, the impervious professor Anfilogov and his humble, steel-toothed conspirator, Kolyan. As Slavnikova’s high-strung, stubbornly romantic narrator, Krylov, a down-and-out historian turned gem cutter, sees them off at the train station, he falls in love with a stranger. Their affair is so clandestine they don’t know each other’s names or why they’re being followed. more
I’ve already mentioned Kyle Semmel’s wonderful review for Three Percent, and now there are also reviews in Russian Life, ForeWord Reviews, and New York Journal of Books.
On the heels of the publication of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 (Overlook) and the paperback edition of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Yale), an interview with me in the Boston Globe.
Kyle Semmel of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has given my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017—just out from Overlook Press—a very nice review indeed:
It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open 2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the collapse of the Czarist autocracy and gave rise to the Soviet Union. It’s against this backdrop that readers enter this novel: a pot brimming with precious stones, a dash of spy novel intrigue, and a raw-to-the-bone social critique bubbling and boiling in a dense, evocative stew.
Excuse the metaphor. This is not a novel of food—far from it. But 2017 is a novel that asks you to savor it slowly, bite by bite. Translator Marian Schwartz, one of the most accomplished Russian translators working today—who has translated the works of Nina Berberova, Edvard Radzinsky, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others—has recreated Slavnikova’s dense novel in a smooth, eminently enjoyable English text. Passages describing the craft of obscure trades like gemcutting or rock-hounding flow from sentence to sentence with ease, making the translation seem effortless.
To read the rest, go straight to Three Percent, the blog for international literature out of the University of Rochester, or click here.
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.
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 most recent book translations are Olga Slavnikova's 2017 (Overlook Press), Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard (Yale University Press) and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press), now out in paperback from Yale University Press. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Subtropics has published my translation of Mark Girshin’s “Seaweed Mattress,” a series of vignettes about a childhood spent in Odessa in the 1910s and 1920s, part of his longer memoir, Mosaic. The title refers to the custom there, on the Black Sea, of stuffing mattresses with seaweed rather than straw. In Anastasia Kozak’s interview with Girshin for the magazine, Girshin says he is currently working on a novel, Genghis Khan with a Telephone, “which was how Nikolai Bukharin referred to Stalin.”
The graphics used on this site were inspired by the work of Liubov Popova (1889-1924), a Russian artist and designer influenced by Constructivism and Futurism, as seen in her biography, by D.V. Sarabianov and N.L. Adaskina, Liubov Popova, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990.