Inna LisnianskayaHow did Russian poets get typecast? Had it something to do with opposition to the Soviet regime? If this wasn’t the whole story, it was at least part of it. Though I kept what I thought was a close watch on Russian poetry, I had only vaguely heard of Inna Lisnianskaya. It was in connection with an exhaustive sweep of the terrain, so to speak, for an anthology of Russian women poets [published by University of Iowa Press in 2006] that Lisnianskaya came fully to my notice. I began to read through her entire oeuvre and to identify poems, which I felt were translatable by myself. Eventually, I had in hand a small selection, which was published bilingually by Arc. Meanwhile, Inna Lisnianskaya, nearly eighty, continues prolifically to produce poetry of the highest quality. My translator’s criterion now is simply what I feel able to translate, as she seems incapable of writing a negligible poem. Lisnianskaya is primarily a lyric poet and I have not given up the hope of working towards an English equivalency. However, I know from experience that absolute success is out of the question, it being more realistic to strive for a kind of accuracy, if not just of verbal sense, but also of movement, texture, even form, which can sometimes be imitated non-mimetically. --Daniel Weissbort Inna Lisnianskaya was born in Baku in 1928. Her first publication was in 1948 and her first poetry collection appeared in 1957. Since 1979, her books have appeared primarily outside the US. In recent years she has published several more collections in Russia and has contributed regularly to all major literary periodicals. Lisnianskaya was married to the late Semyon Lipkin, also a leading Russian poet, and her most recent collection partly consists of an elegy to him. She lives in Moscow. Former director of the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa, Daniel Weissbort is presently a research fellow at King’s College London University, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the co-founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, and is well known for his anthologies of Russian and East European poetry; he is also the author of several collections of poems, a translational memoir of Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love, the editor of the Selected Translations of Ted Hughes, and co-editor, with Astraldur Eysteinsson, of Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford, 2006). He is writing a book on Ted Hughes and translation. |
Inna Lisnianskaya |