A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
Yelena Posina is a native of Odessa, Ukraine. She studied English and Linguistics at the Moscow University for Foreign Languages. In the spring of 1979, Yelena immigrated to the United States. Over the years she taught Russian at Hofstra University and Stony Brook University in New York. Yelena writes poetry in her native language, Russian, and translates poetry of The Silver Age from Russian into English. Yelena Posina entered the academic world as a translator in 1987. Her translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Verses about Moscow” and Anna Akhmatova’s “The Last Toast” were included in the Anthology of Russian Literature from Earliest Writings to Modern Fiction. The second edition of this anthology was published in 2004.
As a poet and as a translator, Yelena can be compared to a musician with a perfect pitch. She handles original texts with care and respect.
Her ability to get close to the material and to express all its merits in a foreign language is amazing, as she carefully considers all aspects of the original poems in search of most nuanced and adequate English equivalents. Yelena’s goal as a translator is to preserve all the aspects of the original: its rhyme, meter, tonality, and, of course, the semantic beauty of each piece. The harmony of music and meter, so typical of Russian versification, is always present in her work.
Yelena often achieves what may seem unachievable: she conveys in a foreign language the astonishing beauty and the intimacy of the Russian verse. While a translation of an original poem is being created, a lot is being done on the intuitive level. Intuition is crucial for
translating from one’s native language into a foreign one. The broader scope of Yelena’s work is to share with English-speaking readers the
semantic depth, the refinement, and the spirituality of Russian poetry. Roman Jacobson, a renowned scholar-linguist, once claimed that poetry is untranslatable. However, many of Yelena’s translations are proof to the contrary. Most poems translated by her have not lost
their conceptual value, their musicality, or their emotional impact on the reader. In many instances, she manages to even include the same alliterations in her translated texts as appear in the originals, and certain lines emerge as verbatim translations of the original texts.
Alla Rostovskaya,
Doctor of Arts, Ph.D.,
Stony Brook University, New York
Department of Comparative Literatures
PUBLICATIONS:
-An Anthology of Russian Literature, Introduction to a Culture: M.E. Sharpe, New York, 1996
(“The Last Toast” from “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova, “Verses about Moscow” by M. Tsvetaeva)
-Slovo/Word Magazine: Cultural Center for Soviet Refugees, Issue # 51, New York, 2006
(Silver Age Poetry in Translation: Poems by A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, and M. Tsvetaeva)
-An Anthology of Russian Literature, Second Edition: M.E. Sharpe, New York, 2004