Translators

Lisa Hayden

Lisa Hayden

Quick Study: Lisa Hayden primarily translates contemporary fiction. Lisa also writes a blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf, about Russian literature.

Why She Does It: “When I came back to the U.S. after living in Moscow for six years, I wanted to write fiction. I even wrote an entire draft of a novel but I hated having to find ways to create narrative momentum and develop characters. I just wanted to choose and arrange words! I’m glad I never published any of my stories but now, as a translator and literary blogger, I can use my Russian along with a lot of what I learned in writing workshops back then, whether it’s stylistic preferences—things like using simple dialogue tags—or recognizing when and why a plot begins falling apart. All of which is to say translation blends two of the things I enjoy most: very close readings of Russian books and writing fiction in English.”

Pssssst…..: Lisa’s interest in Russian literature began when her parents bought her a subscription to Jack and Jill magazine, which sometimes published “Baba Yaga” stories, when she was around eight years old. During the first several years she wrote her blog, Lisa hardly read any fiction in English, though she now regularly reads translations into English and books written in English.

Continue Reading...


Joanne Turnbull

Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club. Memories of the Future, and The Autobiography of A Corpse (winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize and 2014 PEN Translation Prize) – all published by New York Review Books. 

Turnbull’s recent reviews include:


Marian Schwartz

Marian Schwartz has been translating Russian fiction and nonfiction for over thirty years. Her work includes Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Tsar, Yuri Olesha’s Envy, and many works by Nina Berberova, including Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg (New York Review Books). 


Donald Rayfield

Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London. Rayfield translated and introduced the Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (New York Review Books). 


Jamey Gambrell

Jamey Gambrell was a writer on Russian art and culture, and a translator. She was perhaps best known for translating Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy (published by New York Review Books), Day of the Oprichnik (FSG), and The Blizzard (FSG). Among her other translations are Tatyana Tolstaya's novel The Slynx and Letters: Summer 1926, a collection of letters between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke; both books were published by New York Review Books. She also translated Earthly Signs, another New York Review Books edition, which collects essays based on diaries kept during 1917-1922. Jamey Gambrell passed away on February 15, 2020.


Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler is the author of Alexander Pushkin and the editor of two anthologies for Penguin Classics: Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Everything Flows, The Road, and An Armenian Sketchbook (all published by New York Review Books) and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. Together with Olga Meerson and his wife, Elizabeth Chandler, he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov for NYRB Classics, including The Foundation Pit, Happy Moscow, and Soul, which won the 2004 AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) Prize. He is a coeditor of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky, to be published by Penguin Classics in November 2014. 


Page 1 of 2 pages  1 2 >