Translators' Evening of Russian prose & poetry, Pushkin House

Tue 1 May 2012 – 7.30pm
Talk
Sixth Translators' Evening: Antony Wood and Donald Rayfield 
PROGRAMME OF PUSKIN CLUB
Language: In English


The Pushkin Club is continuing with its series of events: “Translators’ Evenings”, where translators of Russian poetry and prose read and discuss their work. Translators, academics, students and anybody interested in Russian literature are invited to discuss the relation between the original and the translation, compare (if available) different translations of the same original and see how the art of translation helps literature to cross over boundaries between languages and cultures.


Translations and originals are available before the evening, below. If you wish to follow the discussion please print them out and bring them with you.


An extract from Gogol’s Dead Souls and a Mandelstam poem translated by Donald Rayfield.


Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. His books include The Dream of Lhasa (a biography of Nikolay Przhevalsky), Anton Chekhov — A Life (its Russian version has been a best-seller for some five years), Stalin and his Hangmen (which has been translated into nine other languages), and A History of Georgian Literature. His Edge of Empire: A History of Georgia will be published by Reaktion Books in September. He has translated Gogol’s Dead Souls (with Marc Chagall’s engravings), a book praised by William Boyd, as well as Georgian and Russian poetry


ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions translated by Antony Wood


Antony Wood is the publisher of Angel Books, devoted entirely to translations of classic foreign fiction and poetry, and himself a translator. His translations of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies (Mozart and Salieri etc) and selected narrative poems have been published in the UK and USA, and his translation of the first (1825) version of Boris Godunov has been published and staged in the USA. Paul Scofield, Simon Callow, Ralph Fiennes, Alec McCowen, Prunella Scales and Michael Pennington are among those who have given live and broadcast readings of his Pushkin translations.


Tickets: 7, conc. 5 (students and OAPs), free for Friends of Pushkin House
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/sixth-translators-evening-antony-wood-and-donald-rayfield