Four Russian writers, visiting the UI through the International Writing Program and the U.S. Congress’ Open World program, will participate tonight in an English reading of their works.
The reading will take place today at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. Works from Ekaterina Boyarskikh, Maxim Amelin, Natalya Klyuchareva, and Oleg Zobern will be presented. Admission is free.
The writers arrived on Sept. 9 as part of the Open World program. The program’s website states that its goal is to “enhance understanding and capabilities for cooperation between the United States and the countries of Eurasia and the Baltic States.”
As part of their visit, the writers met with UI M.F.A. students to discuss translation and the Russian literary scene. They also will meet with an undergraduate international literature class today.
For some, this is the first time their literary work has been translated into English.
“I saw the translation of my work, and I liked it,” poet Boyarskikh said. Her work has been previously translated into English, French, and Ukrainian, and a selection of her poetry will be read at Prairie Lights.
Two of the writers, poet Amelin and fiction writer Klyuchareva, said that translating poetry from Russian into English is very difficult. Amelin, who uses a combination of historic and contemporary Russian in his poems, said a difference in styles between the two languages is a key reason for problems with translating works from Russian into English.
“The Russian language is heavily accented,” he said. “You can’t change [the accents], otherwise you change the meaning.” Amelin is a translator himself who specializes in converting Latin and ancient Greek poetry into Russian. Despite the inherent difficulties, he said, he is happy with the way the translations turned out.
Klyuchareva, who had one of her short stories translated into English for the first time, said sometimes the meaning and importance of words can be changed in translation.
“I try to have my language be insignificant because I want people to be attracted to the content of my work,” she said. In the English translations of her work, there is sometimes too much focus on the language itself.
“There appear to be some things that were untranslatable, and when converted to another language they seemed kind of weird sounding, and because of that, they attract attention,” she said.