Poem Translation by Andrew Wachtel

April 5, 2012

On Thursday April 4, 2012, during National Poetry Month in the United States, Poetry Daily, an anthology of contemporary poetry, published "Apples", a poem by Anzhelina Polonskaya from her new book Snow Within, which will be published by Zephyr Press in 2012, and is translated from Russian by AUCA President Andrew Wachtel.

The poem, which also appears in the March/April issue of American Poetry Review, is one of the few translated poems to be featured on the site.  Ms. Polonskaya and Dr. Wachtel also collaborated on A Voice, which was published by Northwestern University Press in 2004 and shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu Popescu Prize fro European Poetry in Translation.  

Ms. Polonskaya's poetry is written in the form of tiny compressed narratives.  Her more recent work has become more visual in nature and can almost be described as pictorial.  She is fond of ellipses, omitting words that can be understood from contextual clues.  This presents a number of challenges to the translator.  Russian grammatical constructions leave elegant ellipses for the reader so that they can engage with a very compressed work.  This is not always possible in English, and Dr. Wachtel says that there is a very fine line between being true to the poem, and meeting readers' expectations of a translation.  "People are less willing to work to understand a translation." Dr. Wachtel said, "They think that if they don't get it the first time, then there must have been something lost in the translation.  I want to preserve the conciseness in Anzhelina's work, and also give the readers everything they need to  make sense of the poem, but not to solve it for them."

Ms. Polonskaya and Dr. Wachtel first met at Northwestern University in 1999, when Ms. Polonskaya was chosen by Andrew Voznesensky to be part of a small delegation of Russian poets to a conference/literary festival organized by Dr. Wachtel entitled "Three Lands, The Generations."  The event brought together poets from Russia, Poland, and Slovenia as well as poets and critics from the United States.  At the time, Ms. Polonskaya was the youngest participant, but impressed all of the conference participants.

This exposure led to a number of international engagements, including the publishing of A Voice, and the upcoming Snow Within.  Ms. Polonskaya has also broadened her art to include opera.  Her first libretto, entitled Kursk, was triumphantly received at the Melbourne Festival in October 2011.  Kursk tells the story of the ill-fated Russian Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine that sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000.  A second libretto is now being written, devoted to the tragedy of Russia's wars in the Caucasus since the 1990s and to the tragedy of war in general.

Dr. Wachtel is confident that the new libretto will be as well received as the first was.  In the mean time, the two are working on another collection Paul Klee's Boat, and Ms. Polonskaya is working on a promising manuscript.  The poem "Apples" is reproduced in both Russian and English below, and can be found on the website www.poems.com, as well as the American Poetry Review.

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