Contemporary Translation in Transition : Poems, Theories, Conversations

This book investigates the hybrid, multiform nature of contemporary poetry with particular emphasis on recent Russian lyric and its translations into German and English. Poetry translation, thriving and obstinately open-ended, is not so much a defined process as a practice of ongoing transit across linguistic and national borders. The book’s innovative format invites contemporary poets into dialogue with literary translators, editors, publishers, and scholars; the conversations among their wide-ranging essays, poems, and exchanges both model and investigate the work of transcultural dialogue. As a kind of transition, poetry translation engages the composition and disintegration of forms, revises relations of producers to receivers, mixes and rethinks genres and media, translates itself as multilingual writing or language experiment. Multiple translations of a poem do not compete but interact, reshaping the putative gulf between source and target language. In the end this volume underscores the aesthetic productivity of poetry translation and the need to nurture it. A must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic interplay of poetry, language, and culture.

Maria Khotimsky is Senior Lecturer in Russian in the Global Languages Department at MIT. She is the co-editor of The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova: Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention (2019) and Olga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (2017). Her research interests include literary translation, content-based language pedagogy, and translingual poetry.

Friederike Reents is Full Professor in German Literature in German Department at Eichstätt University  She is the co-editor of Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht – Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (Lyrikforschung. Neue Arbeiten zur Theorie und Geschichte der Lyrik, Bd. 1) (2021) and Lyrik und Erkenntnis (2019). Her research interests include lyricology, environmental humanities, and literary translation.

Henrieke Stahl-Schwaetzer is Professor of Slavic Literary Studies at the University of Trier and Executive Editor of the International Journal of Comparative Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on Russian symbolism, philosophy, and poetry. She is author of the monograph Sophia in the Thought of Vladimir Solov’ev: An Aesthetic Reconstruction.

William Waters teaches German & Comparative Literature and Translation at Boston University. He is the author of Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address and numerous essays on poetics and on Rilke. He serves on the board of the Internationale Rilke-Gesellschaft, and co-founded the International Network for the Study of Lyric (lyricology.org).