A couple of months ago, I decided to make my Russian culture survey into an artifact driven class. Rather than lead with the history and then place the culture on top of it, as I used to do it, using the cultural component almost like examples, I would lead with the cultural artifacts, and then… Continue reading Teaching Russian Culture through Artifacts
Author: russellv
People and Achievers
As I think through ways of rendering the language and feel of Notes from Underground more effective for younger readers of English today, it occurs to me that, just as chelovek should often be “person” rather than “man,” so too the frequent references to the U-Man’s listeners as “gentlemen” (which is the ubiquitous translation in… Continue reading People and Achievers
Topping 5000 listens, and a new album!
Ba Ren Chi hit 5000 listens earlier this week, a little less than a year from when I started using Jamendo as its main distribution platform. The other one I use is LANDR, which puts the music into a lot of other places (Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, AppleMusic/iTunes, YouTube Music) but doesn’t seem to get as… Continue reading Topping 5000 listens, and a new album!
Autumn Hill Books’ new website and new titles
Our hosting platform was out of date and non-secure (didn’t have the “s” by the “http” in the URL), so we needed to remake it. The site just went live yesterday, and we’re still working out the bugs, but please have a look at the new features and the new books in the past couple… Continue reading Autumn Hill Books’ new website and new titles
Translating Gender Pronouns
This is a tough topic, mostly because languages are currently in a great deal of flux as they figure out how to deal with the preferences of individuals with regard to expressions of gender and gender identity. The issue is complicated by the myriad different ways that languages mark gender. In some, all nouns have… Continue reading Translating Gender Pronouns
How Translators Teach Translations
Michael Henry Heim used to tell a story of how he had once introduced a bit of translation into his large survey class on Soviet Civilization in the early 1990s, commenting in passing on how a well-known book had been translated differently by two different translators. I believe it might have been Solzhenitsyn’s One Day… Continue reading How Translators Teach Translations
4000 Listens
I’ve been clocking the listens for Ba Ren Chi on Jamendo by the thousand, and it seems to hit a new threshold every couple of months, but I missed the four thousand mark a week or so ago. 4000 listens! Fantastic! Hello, listeners! In the meantime, since I can’t release a single on Jamendo and… Continue reading 4000 Listens
People Reading Kin
I’ve been very happy to see several positive reviews of Kin in the past few days since its official release. Sarah McEachern’s piece in the LA Review of Books, “Entangled in Family: On Miljenko Jergović’s Kin and Semezdin Mehmedinović’s My Heart,” takes the title and the book’s biggest thematic thread as its main focus, with… Continue reading People Reading Kin
Kin’s Arrival, blogging, and podcasting
My copy of Kin came in the mail a few days ago, all 911 pages of it. It made the mailbox sag a bit. I didn’t have time to think much about it at the time, but since then I have scrolled back through the blog that I kept while translating the book beginning in… Continue reading Kin’s Arrival, blogging, and podcasting
Three Rubaiyat
(Feel free to listen to this post as a podcast on Spotify if you’d like.) Cleaning up my office, I found these three translated rubaiyat (in Russian rubai) by the Uzbek author Sabit Madaliev that I must have translated in about 2005 or so. They were published back then in an earlier incarnation of eXchanges… Continue reading Three Rubaiyat
Russell Scott Valentino 