The Art of Translation: Dialogues

The Russian American Cultural Center presents:
The Art of Translation. Dialogues
The author and the host: Irina Mashinski
Dialogue #8: with Sasha Dugdale

Video recording on the RACC/Roman Khidekel YouTube channel

A series of conversations in the RACC movable studio: the poet and essayist Irina Mashinski in dialogue with masters of the ancient art and craft of translation, as they discuss the place of translation in today’s world and reflect on their work.  
What is translation, after all? What is the nature and the role of the ‘original’ in each particular case? What is actually being translated? And why is it relevant today, of all times?

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. She has published five collections of poetry with the Manchester-based press Carcanet, most recently Deformations which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the international Derek Walcott Prize. She has also won a Forward Prize and a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Sasha Dugdale's translations include Maria Stepanova’s prose memoir In Memory of Memory which was shortlisted for a number of UK prizes after its publication in 2021, including the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize, the Weidenfeld Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. She has translated a number of dramatic works for stage and radio, including plays by Chekhov and the generation of playwrights who came of age after Perestroika. Most recently she translated Natalya Vorozhbyt's play about women in wartorn Ukraine, Bad Roads, which has been staged at the Royal Court and many other theatres in the UK and US. Her poetry translations include the work of Elena Shvarts and Maria Stepanova, as well as a number of translations of poets for magazines and anthologies, including Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam.

Dugdale was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation between 2012 and 2017 – the magazine Ted Hughes founded for the publication of poetry in translation in 1965.

Irina Mashinski was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow University, where she studied theory of landscape and completed her PhD in paleoclimatology. In 1991, she emigrated to the United States, where she taught high school mathematics as well as literature, history, and meteorology at several universities. Mashinski is the author The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) and of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the journal of Brown University’s Slavic Department. Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies both in the US and internationally. Her second English book, Giornata (Červená Barva Press), is forthcoming in the fall of 2022. Website: www.irinamashinski.com

This program is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Cojeco and Tianaderrah Foundation.