Tue 15 May 2012 – 7.30pm at PUSHKIN HOUSE, 5A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1 2TA
Nadezhda Teffi (1872–1952) with Irina Steinberg, Anne Marie Jackson and Robert Chandler
Teffi’s admirers included not only such writers as Bunin, Bulgakov and Zoshchenko but also both Tsar Nicholas II and Lenin; she had a wide readership throughout her life. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. For forty years after her death, however, she was almost forgotten – because she was a woman, because she was thought ‘lightweight’ (critics noticed her wit more than her perceptiveness); and because, during the Cold War, both Western and Soviet scholars tended to ignore émigré literature. Since the early 1990s, Teffi has been published more and more widely in Russia. Nevertheless, her earlier, lighter stories are still better known than the more profound stories and memoirs she wrote after emigrating to Paris.
Robert Chandler spends most of his time translating Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, but he wishes he had more time to devote to Teffi. He will read from “Skazochka”, a brilliant piece about a chance meeting, in a French forest, between a young Russian boy and a deeply disorientated Baba Yaga, unable to adapt to the difficulties of emigre life.
Anne Marie Jackson is halfway through a translation MA at UCL. During the past year she has worked with Robert Chandler within the framework of the new mentorship scheme sponsored by the Translators Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation. Teffi is one of the writers she has been translating. Anne Marie will talk briefly about what she refers to as “Teffi’s pitch-perfect prose” and read her translation of Teffi’s “The Hat”.”
Irina Steinberg was born in Russia, immigrated to England as a child and now lives in London. She has a degree in English from UCL and a keen interest in translation which she pursues in her time away from her day job as a lawyer. Currently, Irina is working, with Robert Chandler, on a translation of Teffi’s Memoirs (Vospominaniya) – the witty, tragicomic account of Teffi’s last journey across Russia, from Petersburg to the Black Sea, before she emigrated for good. Irina will talk about why she so admires this work and read from it briefly.
