(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
Translating Amanda Gorman
Non-translators might not have paid much attention to the recent controversy over the projected translation of U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s first book of poetry into Dutch, but many of us who translate have been following and discussing it quite a bit. The basic story is that the contracted publisher (Meulenhoff) hired author… Continue reading Translating Amanda Gorman
Workshop Meets Gogol
The fifth of the seven chapters in George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (which, I will repeat here for those who have not been following, I am enjoying immensely and learning a lot from) features Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.” This was a risky move on Saunders’ part because the basically rational… Continue reading Workshop Meets Gogol
Teaching Tolstoy’s Master and Man
In the three decades or so that I have been teaching works by Tolstoy, I don’t remember ever teaching the one known in English as “Master and Man.” This could be because it didn’t speak to me when I first read it or because I have consistently felt there were other, more effective works that… Continue reading Teaching Tolstoy’s Master and Man
On Fairytales, Folktales, Wondertales, and… Tales
Vladimir Propp makes clear in his Исторические корни волшебной сказки (Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki) that the subject of his study is indeed the волшебная сказка [volshebnaia skazka] announced in its title. However, in his exposition, he often uses the term сказка [skazka] without any attribute. This term happens to be the word used for “folktale,” “fairy tale,” and simply “tale” in English, which… Continue reading On Fairytales, Folktales, Wondertales, and… Tales
