Translation and Retranslation: priorities, discoveries, pleasures

TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Oliver Ready (St Antony’s College) and Sasha Dugdale (Writer in Residence, St John’s College, Cambridge), two leading translators from the Russian, will discuss their work This event is part of the Russian and Slavonic Research Seminar series which is kindly supported by the Ilchester Fund. The convenors of the series are Professor Catriona Kelly and Professor Philip Bullock. To find out more about the series, visit their webpage here. https://www.ongc.ox.ac.uk/event/russian-and-slavonic-research-seminar Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection, Deformations (Carcanet 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Her translations include work by Vasily Sigarev, Elena Shvarts, Tatiana Shcherbina, and most recently, Maria Stepanova (The War of the Beast and the Animals, Bloodaxe, 2021 and In Memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo, 2021). Oliver Ready’s translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment ('A truly great translation . . . This English version really is better', A. N. Wilson, Spectator), And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon: Essential Stories by Nikolai Gogol, and Vladimir Sharov (‘the clarity and directness of Sharov's prose – wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready’, Rachel Polonsky, NYRB).