2013 Maria Petrovykh Competition

Joined literary event in London, UK

The Compass Translation Award -2013 Ceremony and Reading

The Maria Petrovykh Competition

Sponsored by Pushkin Club, Cardinal Points Journal, and Russian American Cultural Center

The Compass Award was established in 2011 by the Cardinal Points Journal in order to recognize the best English translations of Russian poetry.  Each year the competition is dedicated to a particular Russian poet. The third Compass Award contest (2013) was for translations of Maria Petrovykh (1908-79).

Petrovykh was a poet of exquisite precision and subtlety. Anna Akhmatova greatly admired her work and she inspired one of Osip Mandestam's most famous love poems. Yet, unlike her fellow masters, she has not yet attained general recognition. In part, this is due to her own humility; she published only one collection in her lifetime, and devoted most of her professional life to editing and translating the work of others. The organizers of the Compass Competiton felt it was time for Petrovykh's own verse to benefit from the attention of translators as gifted and inspired as she herself.

The poet, whose work will be suggested for translation in the 2014 competition, is Arseny Tarkovsky. A segment of the evening will be dedicated to his work.

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Participants: winners and commended translators: Josephine von Zitzewitz (UK), Alexandra Berlina (Germany), Peter Oram (UK-Germany), and Dina Gussejnova (UK).

Also participating are Angela Livingstone, Peter Daniels, and Robert Chandler (Compass judges), Masha Karp, and Poel Karp.

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The Compass Translation Award is a part of the StoSvet project, which also includes the (Storony Sveta) and Cardinal Pointsjournals and Stosvet Press publishing house. The project was co-founded by poets Oleg Woolf (1954-2011) and Irina Mashinski, its current Editor.