Creating the translation of a poem is typically the work of an individual. This is not surprising because translating, or more precisely, recreating, a poem in another language is a creative act that is initially inspired by how a specific individual, the translator, reads and experiences the original text.
Robert Bly offered a vivid picture of how the creative consciousness struggles with the task after that original moment of inspiration: “The difficulties are all one difficulty, something immense, knotted, exasperating, fond of disguises, resistant, confusing, all of a piece. One translates a poem in fits and starts, getting a half line here, weeks later the other half, but one senses a process.” The process finally ends “when one says goodbye” to the work (“The Eight Stages of Translation,” Kenyon Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1982), pp. 68-89).
Collaborating with a trusted community of translators makes this process both more effective and a lot more enjoyable than encountering it alone. The translations in this set of Russophone poems have gone through a collaborative editing process. Translators’ notes attached to these poems offer a window into the impact of this process. The translators discuss examples of the revisions they made after extensive email-based workshop discussion by the Kopilka team.
The Kopilka poetry project came into being both because of and despite war and repression. The project is the brainchild of Julia Nemirovskaya, a poet who lives in the United States and teaches at the University of Oregon. Nemirovskaya came of age in the “new wave” poetry underground in Moscow during the late Soviet period. Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, several of her Moscow friends joined antiwar protests in Russia. After these protests were suppressed and their participants persecuted or threatened with arrest, these friends reached out to Nemirovskaya asking her to preserve copies of their poetry. She saw a need for a safe place to archive Russophone poetry of witness. She called this archive Kopilka (“coin bank” in Russian). Nemirovskaya was soon contacted by Russophone poets from all over the world. She has continued to expand and curate the collection. In addition to authors from Russia, Kopilka now holds the work of many poets from Ukraine and other countries.
The project has attracted literary translators. We, the Kopilka translation team, are an international group of volunteers who work on making the poetry in the archive accessible to Anglophone readers. At the time of writing, the Kopilka crew consists of Julia Nemirovskaya (as editor), Maria Bloshteyn, Larry Bogoslaw, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Yana Kane, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Dmitri Manin, Josephine von Zitzewitz, Niles Watterson, and Olga Zvyeryeva. Some of us are native Russian speakers who grew up in what is now Russia or Ukraine. Some are native English speakers. Some are focused purely on translation, and some are also poets. We therefore bring different strengths and different perspectives to the practice of poetry translation.
So far, the work of the Kopilka translation team has resulted in two anthologies: Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2023) and Dislocation (Slavica Publishers / Three String Books, 2024). We are currently preparing a third anthology with the working title Solastalgia.
Each translation starts as the work of an individual translator, and that translator is ultimately responsible for the final decisions about the text. But most translations in our collection are polished by the team. In workshop-style email exchanges among us, we encourage, praise, and critique each other’s work. We make suggestions on how to interpret the original and how to render the poem in English. A single line, a single word, might be discussed for days until a translation conundrum is resolved.
In rare cases, the author of the original poem wishes to offer their perspective on the translation. Most authors either do not feel fluent enough in English to comment or prefer to give the translator “carte blanche” because, for instance, they feel that the translator’s interpretation of a poem should be derived only from the text of that poem without any other input from the author. In those cases where the authors do choose to get involved, the final word is still with the translator, but the author’s input is incorporated into the discussion.
Our nerdy, friendly, occasionally quite impassioned, and often jocular email exchanges help us maintain the quality of our translations and motivate us to keep working on the project. But the significance of this collaboration and of the camaraderie and friendships that grow out of this work extends beyond the specific literary results. The Kopilka is a miniature but vibrant “Republic of Letters”—a non-geographical place where we, Kopilkans, translators and poets, find intellectual and spiritual citizenship based on both individual creativity and joyful collaboration.
Yana Kane
Featured Poets and Translators:
Irina Rypka, Ukraine, translated by Olga Zvyeryeva
Mio Grand, Russia, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya