In this week of literary news, our editors report from book launches and translator talks in the UK, as well as a tremendous breakthrough of a Kenyan poet.

Sophie Benbelaid, Senior Assistant Editor, reporting from the UK

The final days of January were ones of much hustle and bustle in Bloomsbury with Pushkin House’s ever-packed line-up of talks and events—all before their dual-language Russian-English bookshop temporarily closed for important renovations. On January 26, they welcomed translators Irina Sadovina (based at the University of Sheffield) with her newly released translation of Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (perhaps most known for her English rendering of Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country) with her 2020 translation of Yuri Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave; the two discussed their experience of translating indigenous literature from the Russian North.

Nerkagi was born in the Polar Ural Tundra and is Nenets, while Rytkheu hails from Uelen in Chukotka, on the easternmost tip of Russia and a mere sixty miles from Alaska. Though the Nenets and Chukchi’s livelihoods are comprised of different practices, both works share an ethnographical foundation and a reverence for indigenous folklore and mythology. It was fascinating to hear about Sadovina and Chavasse’s processes on translating literature from a society with a post-oral literature, as well as the challenge of finding the precarious middle ground between domestication and foreignization. Though the novels were both originally penned in Russian, their impact and representation of their distinct cultures cannot be understated—and neither can their translators’. In the quest for the balance between artistry and service, Sadovina and Chavasse have accomplished an ineffable feat for anglophone readers. READ MORE…