Translation and Retranslation: priorities, discoveries, pleasures

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).