This month in the translation interview series in celebration of National Translation Month, you’ll meet poet, playwright, and translator Sasha Dugdale. Dugdale is a poet, translator and editor. She has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Red House (Carcanet, 2011). Her long poem ‘Joy’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016. She translates poetry and plays from Russian and has worked with theatres across the UK and US on new productions of contemporary Russian plays. She is currently working on translations of Maria Stepanova’s poems for publication in the UK. Sasha is editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and co-editor of the international anthology Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016).
Loren Kleinman (LK): How did you start working for Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT)?
Sasha Dugdale (SD: I became editor of Modern Poetry in Translation in 2012, following David and Helen Constantine’s editorship. I’d published in the magazine and I’d been involved as a board member before that, so I’ve had a connection with the magazine for a long while.
LK: Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded MPT back in 1965. Can you talk about their contribution to translation, including how they promoted the internationalism of translation?
SD: Ted Hughes founded the magazine at a particular time in the world, the sixties – the decade after ’the isolationism of the fifties’ as he put it in his later prose, when hope, internationalism and a youthful revolutionary spirit saw a number of international poetry collaborations and publications come to fruition. It was also a period of geopolitical instability: the Cold War reached a peak in the sixties with the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort saw the importance of publishing work from those areas which were particularly affected by political change and repression. In the editorial of the first issue they described their desire to publish work from the ‘Centre of Cataclysm’ and by this they meant Soviet Eastern Europe. The first issue includes poets of magnitude: Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Ivan Lalić, Vasko Popa, Czesław Miłosz and Andrei Voznesensky.
It was of course all part of a larger trend towards internationalism in the 60s, but there is no doubt in my mind that Ted and Danny not only contributed to this trend, but also shaped it to a large extent. Ted’s own work translating poets such as Janos Pilinszky and his founding of Poetry International in 1967, Danny’s work to bring contemporary Russian poets into English and his teaching of translation… all of this gave us later translators a much firmer ground to work from. And we need that firm ground now as we are living through a very similar time: there is interest and hope and enthusiasm and a sense of opposing a geopolitical order which is essentially inimical.
LK: How has your own love for translation inspired the work you do for MPT?
SD: I spent a long time living in Russia, and I always had what I think is a human desire to somehow reconcile the experience and philosophy of life in Russia and life in the UK. The nub of this reconciliation has to be language. For years I would worry away at equivalences, trying to render them this way and that, and when I translate literature this is the approach I take: I worry away at the differences, I try to think through the consequences of each decision. I try this solution, that solution. I honestly think that editing MPT is a similar experience in that I am always worrying away at something which is essentially impossible: to represent world poetry through a little magazine. But the desire to make it work means that my colleagues and I pour our hearts into the endeavour.
LK: Discuss translating plays, specifically your experience translating Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
SD: I translate plays for theatres in the UK and USA. I’ve concentrated on contemporary Russian plays, but I have also had commissions to translate Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters for BBC Radio. Translating the Chekhov was a particular experience, because everyone knows his work in theatre and has a view on it. Any new translation is inevitably going to be compared with the translations that went before it. The hard thing about Chekhovian dialogue is that you are often not translating the words, but trying to capture the gestus of the line, charting a relationship between the speakers, calculating the angles of returns. Every line is a separate small judgement, a new calculation. That is the case with any dialogue for theatre, but especially so with Chekhov because his characters often speak apparently lightly, jokingly, they are used to each other and each other’s unhappiness. You can’t translate the apparent meaning without at least considering what it conceals and ‘measuring’ the gap between the two.
I’d like to translate more Chekhov for the theatre, and work with actors and director to hone the translation, to make sure those relationships survive, but there is a versioning culture around Chekhov’s work, which means that all the produced translations are by mono-lingual playwrights working from literals. This approach has yielded dramatically interesting results, but I think there is space for something linguistically more inventive.
LK: Which authors have you recently discovered as a result of their work being translated to English?
SD: I read poetry in translation every day and I’m excited and influenced by it. The work of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon in Don Mee Choi’s translations is very important to me and I’m deeply intrigued by the 1930s modernist poet Yi Sang whose masterpiece ‘Crow’s Eye View’ is one of the oddest and most distinctive things I’ve read in a while (published in the Korean issue of MPT and translated by Jack Jung). Kutti Revathi is one of my favourite women poets – she writes in Tamil and has been translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, and her poem ‘Breasts’ was deeply scandalous in Sri Lanka for no other reason than a woman shouldn’t be allowed to write about her body if it also happens to be a sexual object.
We’ve published First World War poetry by Belgian Stefan Hertmans and I loved the recent memoir about his soldier-grandfather War and Turpentine translated by David McKay. I read anything translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones from Polish, by Margaret Jull Costa or Daniel Hahn from Spanish and Portuguese or David Colmer from Dutch. And where would we be without Elena Ferrante or Han Kang?
LK: Do you have to be a translator to enjoy, or feel passionate about translation?
SD: We’re all translators, in a sense. I always describe translation as an act of close reading, and it is within anyone’s gift to be a close reader of literature.
Check out more translation during September on NationalTranslationMonth.org. Read more about Sasha Dugdale and her work.