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The Silver Age of Russian-to-English Translation

Russian poetry is often said to have had two periods of efflorescence: the Golden Age of the early nineteenth century and the Silver Age of the early twentieth. As I sit down to write this introduction, it occurs to me that translations of Russian literature into English have also had their Golden Age, and that we are now witnessing their second bloom. The analogy is revealing on several counts. Like the Golden Age of Russian poetry—which produced a handful, but really only a handful, of geniuses—the Golden Age of Russian-toEnglish translation is associated with a relatively small number of brilliant women and men; chief among these is the unjustly maligned Constance Garnett, but one should also mention Louise and Aylmer Maude, John Cournos, as well as S. S. Koteliansky, whose cotranslations with various members of the Bloomsbury set helped lay the groundwork for English modernist prose. Today’s Russian-to-English translation community is far broader and more diverse; the body of work of any given translator might be smaller than that of Garnett, but there are so many more gifted translators that the shared corpus is a monumental achievement. In this, our era of translation does indeed resemble the Silver Age of Russian poetry, which brought us not only Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva but also a plethora of major and minor poets whose works will last as long as Russian verse is read. Of course, the Silver Age was built upon a golden foundation. Like the poets of the Silver Age, contemporary translators stand on the shoulders of giants. And it also serves to recall that, like the period between the two great ages of Russian poetry, the post-Garnett years were anything but fallow; mid-century translators like Mirra Ginsburg, Michael Glenny, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Max Hayward, and Daniel Weissbort dedicated their lives to expanding the canon of Russian literature in English. Even when retranslating, we should always be mindful of—and grateful for—the path-breaking efforts of our predecessors. In recent decades, translators have introduced modern Anglophone readers to major contemporary authors like Vladimir Sorokin (Jamey Gambrell), Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin (Andrew Bromfield), as well as neglected pioneers like Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Joanne Turnbull). Marianne Schwartz, Rosamund Bartlett, and the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, along with many others, have devoted years to retranslating nineteenth-century classics. Robert Chandler has given individual English voices to three twentieth-century masters—Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov, and, most recently, Teffi—while his anthologies have gathered sparkling renditions by myriad translators, from the long-forgotten to those just starting their careers. Contemporary publishers have also played an important role in fostering this Silver Age of