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
Author: russellv
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
Kin in The Harvard Review
This month was earlier slated to be when Archipelago Books released Miljenko Jergović’s Kin in my translation, but that got pushed to the middle of next month. Instead, a short piece, “In Springtime When we Air Out the Graves,” has appeared in this month’s Harvard Review (No. 57), alongside work by Rita Dove, Gregory O’Brien,… Continue reading Kin in The Harvard Review
Post-Short Russian Fiction 2021
I finished grading the short Russian fiction class last week, and, having used a little new material and more new methods, wanted to write a few things down before I forget them. First, one surprise was the Lyudmila Ulitskaya story “Happy” (Nadya L. Peterson, tr.), which was surprisingly easy to teach, probably because it is… Continue reading Post-Short Russian Fiction 2021
Topping 3000 listens
Ba Ren Chi’s music on Jamendo topped three thousand listens a couple of days ago, which makes me happy. This since I first started making it available in October of last year, so about six months overall. It comprises the album Cool 7, a remastered version of Meaner Than That and then the singles Oni… Continue reading Topping 3000 listens
Getting Students to Stay With Me
Keeping students motivated to come to class and do their work is one of the most challenging aspects of online teaching. Since I’m teaching a course that requires reading, encouraging them to read is yet another challenge. This semester I’ve tried a new teaching method and a different way of reading and writing with them… Continue reading Getting Students to Stay With Me
Teaching Russian Short Fiction in Practice
My eight-week online course is now underway, with two meetings and several short assignments under our belts. As the class satisfies a number of requirements in the Arts and Humanities and World Cultures categories, the students come from all over the university and have lots of different backgrounds, career trajectories, skill sets, levels of preparation,… Continue reading Teaching Russian Short Fiction in Practice
Russell Scott Valentino 