The Russian Version
Second edition
Fanailova, Elena
Vertaald door: Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler
Ugly Duckling Presse, 208 blz., paperback, 2019, ISBN 9781946433169
Fanailova, Elena
Vertaald door: Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler
Ugly Duckling Presse, 208 blz., paperback, 2019, ISBN 9781946433169
The Russian Version is a collection of poems that spans Russia’s post-Soviet era. Acclaimed journalist and poet, Elena Fanailova tells stories about the various social layers of a stratified and conflicted nation, reclaiming the poet’s role as social critic, while scrutinizing her own position as citizen and poet. Fanailova’s political lyricism casts personal pain into the net of historical suffering.
The Russian Version received the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry from Three Percent. In her citation for the award, Idra Novey, chair of the BTBA panel for poetry wrote: “The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like. Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire ‘from the hip,’ as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable.”
Elena Fanailova is the author of eight books of poetry. Her poems have been translated into ten languages; in English translation they have been anthologized in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005), and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). She has received the Andrei Bely Award (1999), the Moscow Score Award (2003), and the Znamya award (2008). In 2013, she was awarded a fellowship in Rome by Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund. A book in Italian translation, Lena and the People, was published in Rome in 2015, translated and edited by Claudia Skandura. The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), her first book in English translation, received the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. Born in Voronezh, in central Russia, Fanailova majored in linguistics at Voronezh State University and studied medicine at the Voronezh Medical Institute. She has worked as a doctor, a university professor, and a journalist. At Radio Liberty, Fanailova was the host of the radio program Far from Moscow where she covered a broad range of topics, from the Beslan siege to new Russian prose. In recent years, her journalism has been focused on Central Europe and the Balkans. From 2012 to 2018 she traveled extensively in Ukraine interviewing Ukrainian intellectuals for Radio Liberty. She lives in Moscow.
"a clear-eyed, unflinching poet"
- Eleni Sikelianos
"A remarkable bilingual book... Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling), brilliantly translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler, with a brave introduction by Aleksandr Skidan. Fanailova’s poetry takes on the terrifying realities of private life in post-Soviet Russia during what Skidan calls the 'total civil war' of the early 2000s, that moment when 'the cold draft of history, its garbage wind, was necessary, sweeping away the stage set and starry-eyed illusions of the 1990s and the wreckage piling up before our eyes.'"
- Marjorie Perloff, TLS 2019 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"She is doing something quite different: she assumes the role of the poet as broadcaster, who transforms suppressed and muted private worlds into a distressing signal, to disturb the smugness and cynicism of her contemporaries and compatriots—Russian intellectuals."
- Zinovy Zinik, Times Literary Supplement
The Russian Version received the 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry from Three Percent. In her citation for the award, Idra Novey, chair of the BTBA panel for poetry wrote: “The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like. Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire ‘from the hip,’ as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable.”
Elena Fanailova is the author of eight books of poetry. Her poems have been translated into ten languages; in English translation they have been anthologized in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005), and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). She has received the Andrei Bely Award (1999), the Moscow Score Award (2003), and the Znamya award (2008). In 2013, she was awarded a fellowship in Rome by Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fund. A book in Italian translation, Lena and the People, was published in Rome in 2015, translated and edited by Claudia Skandura. The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), her first book in English translation, received the 2010 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. Born in Voronezh, in central Russia, Fanailova majored in linguistics at Voronezh State University and studied medicine at the Voronezh Medical Institute. She has worked as a doctor, a university professor, and a journalist. At Radio Liberty, Fanailova was the host of the radio program Far from Moscow where she covered a broad range of topics, from the Beslan siege to new Russian prose. In recent years, her journalism has been focused on Central Europe and the Balkans. From 2012 to 2018 she traveled extensively in Ukraine interviewing Ukrainian intellectuals for Radio Liberty. She lives in Moscow.
"a clear-eyed, unflinching poet"
- Eleni Sikelianos
"A remarkable bilingual book... Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling), brilliantly translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler, with a brave introduction by Aleksandr Skidan. Fanailova’s poetry takes on the terrifying realities of private life in post-Soviet Russia during what Skidan calls the 'total civil war' of the early 2000s, that moment when 'the cold draft of history, its garbage wind, was necessary, sweeping away the stage set and starry-eyed illusions of the 1990s and the wreckage piling up before our eyes.'"
- Marjorie Perloff, TLS 2019 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"She is doing something quite different: she assumes the role of the poet as broadcaster, who transforms suppressed and muted private worlds into a distressing signal, to disturb the smugness and cynicism of her contemporaries and compatriots—Russian intellectuals."
- Zinovy Zinik, Times Literary Supplement
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