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List of Translators

Translator: Vitaly Chernetsky, a native of Ukraine, teaches Slavic and Film Studies at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill--Queen’s University Press 2007) and a co-editor of the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House 2000). He has published numerous articles on, as well as translations of, contemporary Russian and Ukrainian writing (both poetry and prose); his translation of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel The Moscoviad is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press.

Translator Tom Dolack teaches Russian and comparative literature at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on translation, imitation and 20th-century poetry, especially in the work of Ezra Pound, Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. He lives in Eugene Oregon with his wife and daughter.

Christine A. Dunbar

Translator Christine Dunbar is a graduate student in the Slavic Department at Princeton University.  She is currently working on a dissertation exploring the influence of Aleksandr Pushkin on contemporary Russian poetry.

Translator Sibelan Forrester has published numerous translations of poetry and prose from Croatian, Russian, and Serbian. In her day job she teaches Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

Peter Golub

Peter Golub is a Moscow born poet and translator. He has published translations of Russian poetry in various journals. In 2007 a bilingual edition of his poems, My Imagined Funeral, was published in Russia. To learn more go to his blog.

Tatyana Golub

Translator Tatyana Golub was born in Moscow and immigrated to the United States in 1989. She currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she lectures at the University of Utah, translates, and is bearing the brunt of global economic collapse.

Translator Rebecca Gould is pursuing her doctorate in the MEALAC department, Columbia University, with a concentration in Persian literature. She translates from Russian, Georgian, and, most recently, Persian. Her writing and translations have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Contemporary Russian Poetry Anthology (Dalkey Archive Press), Transitions Online, Kritika, Caucasus Paradigms (Munster: LIT/ Max Plack), Spaces of Identity, and Film International, and her work is forthcoming in Metamorphosis, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and The Russia Reader (Duke University Press).

Translator J. Kates is a poet and literary translator. He is the author of the poetry collection Mappemonde (Oyster River Press), and is the editor the of Russian poetry anthology: In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr Press). In addition, he has published seven books of poetry translations, including Say Thank You by Mikhail Aizenberg (Zephyr) and When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree by Jean-Pierre Rosnay (Green Integer). He lives in New Hampshire.

Olga Livshin was born in Odessa in 1978 and came to the United States with her family in 1993. Her poetry in English and Russian has been featured in bilingual journals such as Reflect/ Kuaduseshcht. She is a two-time winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, and her translations from Russian appear in Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008) and other publications, and have been staged by Caffeine Theatre in Chicago. She teaches Russian at University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Translator Christopher Mattison graduated with an M.F.A. in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is currently a senior editor at Zephyr Press, co-director of the series Adventures in Poetry and translation editor for the Zoland Poetry annuals. His books of translation include Dmitri Prigov’s 50 Drops of Bloodin an Absorbent Medium (Ugly Duckling Press) and the forthcoming Eccentric Circles: Selected Prose of Venedikt Erofeev (Twisted Spoon Press). Mattison also edited Bei Dao’s first two books of essays—Blue House (Zephyr Press) and Midnight’s Gate (New Directions).

Philip Metres

Philip Metres is a poet, translator, and scholar whose work has appeared in numerous journals and in Best American Poetry (2002). His books include Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007), a study of the interactions between American poets and the peace movement, Instants (2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). Forthcoming is a book of poems, To See the Earth (2008). He is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
See http://www.philipmetres.com and http://www.behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com for more information. He can be reached at pmetres@jcu.edu.

Translator: Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet and translator. His most recent book of poems is The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza. He edited Dmitry Golynko’s As It Turned Out. Both books are available from Ugly Duckling Presse. Matvei Yankelevich and Simona Schneider have helped with the translation appearing here; a draft of a section has come out earlier in Saint-Petersburg Review.

Natasha Randall

Translator Natasha Randall makes her living as a translator and writer in London. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Moscow Times, BookForum and on National Public Radio. She completed a new translation of the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published by The Modern Library in 2006. She has also translated the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva and work by contemporary authors including Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Olga Zondberg. She has just finished a new translation of A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov for Penguin Classics.

Translator Stephanie Sandler is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and a scholar of modern Russian poetry. Her most recent book is Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford University Press). Her translations of contemporary poets have appeared in Circumference, Zoland Almanac, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press).

Zachary Schomburg

Translator Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), the forthcoming Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009) and his most recent chapbook, The Pond (Greying Ghost Press 2008). Poems from a new manuscript are forthcoming in Tammy and Sixth Finch; his collaborations with Emily Kendal Frey are forthcoming in Jubilat and Anti-; his Russian translations of Andrei Sen-Senkov are in Mantis, Circumference. He co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He is in his last year of a poetry Ph.D at the University of Nebraska while he lives in Portland and teaches film at Portland State University.

Marian Schwarz

Translator Marian Schwarz is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as The Poet’s Journey: Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, by Solomon Volkov. Her two most recent book translations to be published are Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard (Yale University Press), which will come out in paperback in 2009, and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (Seven Stories Press). Schwartz is the recipient of two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Her website is marianschwartz.com.

Translator Genya Turovskaya is an American poet. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1973 and grew up in New York City. Her original poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, 6x6, Aufgabe, Poets and Poems, Octopus, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is an editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the author of a chapbook, The Tides (Octopus Books, 2007)

Matvei Yankelevich

Translator Matvei Yankelevich is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he designs books, co-edits 6x6, and edits the Eastern European Poets Series. He edited and translated Today I wrote Nothing: The selected Writings of Danil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). He is a co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern, 2006). His translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Pants” is included in Night Wraps the Sky: Writing By and About Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work (Palm Press, 2006). His essays on Russian-American poets appear in Octopus Magazine (on-line). He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in NYC.