11/3/2023 0 Comments Russian transliteration of poems![]() In 2016 she received the International Words on Borders’ Freedom Prize, and in 2019 her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.Īndrew Wachtel is the rector of Narxoz University in Almaty. Her work has also been translated into German, Dutch, Slovenian, Latvian, and Spanish. Zephyr Press published a second collection of Polonskaya’s work entitled To the Ashes in 2019. In 2013 the bilingual edition Paul Klee’s Boat was published by Zephyr Press and shortlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. In October 2011 the “Oratorio-Requiem” Kursk, the libretto of which consists of ten of Polonskaya’s poems, had its acclaimed debut at the Melbourne Arts Festival. Polonskaya has published translations in many of the world’s leading poetry journals, including The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Ploughshares and the Kenyon Review. Since 2006 Polonskaya has had the opportunity to participate in a number of prestigious writing residencies, including those of the Cove Park Scottish Arts Council, the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and the Villa Sträuli in Zurich. This book was shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. In 2004 an English version of her book, entitled A Voice, appeared in the acclaimed “Writings from an Unbound Europe” series at Northwestern University Press. Since 1998, she has been a member of the Moscow Union of Writers and in 2003, Polonskaya became a member of the Russian PEN-centre. The convoy never sleeps! – enveloped by silenceīut a song wafts from somewhere far away,Īnd there’s no sleeping draught – no escape,Īnzhelina Polonskaya was born in Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. Perhaps most typical of this mood is the last quatrain of the short lyric “Rose of Ash,” which balances the menace of an undefined oppressive state against a faint lyric voice that can potentially oppose it: By contrast, English translations in our (almost) non-inflected language are more like houses of cards – and when you try to remove pieces of the grammatical structure the whole thing tends to fall down.Īs a result, the method I have developed to translate Polonskaya’s poetry over the past twenty years is to, as it were, reconstruct the poem in my mind as I read it, adding back in the missing pieces to allow myself to fully understand how she developed the whole, then writing a translation of this version, which is rather more discursive than the original, and then carefully removing as much of the scaffolding as possible while still keeping my house of cards standing.Īs for the content, the three poems presented here are representative of Polonskaya’s recent work, which (sometimes) finds a very few glimmers of hope amidst a generally bleak landscape which is both personal and political. Thus, a Russian poem, at least grammatically speaking, looks like a Lego construction, from which many blocks can be removed without destroying the structure. When something is left out of a sentence, the empty space can be filled in by the reader. Russian, as an inflected language (like Latin), can place words in pretty much any order within a sentence, and the poet can use case endings to indicate the relationship of nouns to each other and adjectives to nouns. Recreating the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya in English is tricky because her favorite poetic trope is ellipsis, which is easier to achieve in Russian. Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL
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