A great advantage of translation studies is that it is always tied to the real world. Translation always returns to the fact that specific words in a specific language are translated into another language. This limits how abstract the field can get. This foundation of concrete examples is one of the strengths of Contemporary Translation in Transition, edited by Maria Khotimsky, Friederike Reents, Henrieke Stahl, and William Waters.

The volume is based on an international research project, Contemporary Russian-Language Poetry in Translation, and especially a conference held at Harvard in 2020. The academic papers are interspersed with conversations from the conference. Volumes of essays can often have a scattershot feel as each author dives into their own topic. While this applies here, the conversations lend structure to the volume. They tie together and respond to the different ideas, and the change in tone they supply makes the book more enjoyable.

The introduction establishes transition as a key feature of contemporary poetry. It establishes some major running themes: the translator’s identity, translation v. original writing, institutions of translation, self-translation, machine translation, and the tension between translation as cultural adaptation and aesthetic transformation. Most of those topics will already be familiar, but the chapters provide some fascinating new examples.

The first chapter is a conversation between Iain Galbraith and Ainsley Morse. The pivot is Morse’s translation of Grigorii Dashevskii’s “Twins,” whose opening raises issues that will track through the entire volume: “Близнецы, еще внутри у фрау [Twins were swimming still inside their frau]” (5, Morse’s translation). How can you translate a foreign word in a text into a third language and retain the same associations? One answer is ventriloquism: first listening to the poets’ voice, and then casting the translator’s voice out in a way that captures it.

Chapter 2, by Friederike Reents, looks at the concept of Stimmung through the lens of Gottfried Benn’s “Astern.” “Tuning” seems to be the most relevant translation of Stimmung as the focus is on how different elements of a poem need to be tuned to each other to reproduce the original’s effect. This is a useful approach in considering why some seemingly-accurate translations still miss on broader levels.

Lyn Marven in her chapter builds on the idea of Stimmung as feeling to focus on affect studies and translation, starting from the assumption that the translator is an “embodied, feeling agent” (41). The idea that a translation should reproduce the physical experience of the reader is a productive one. Using this idea to find connections between the emotional and intellectual aspects of a text is another form of “attunement,” and Marven’s example from her own translation of Maike Wetzel’s Elly is informative.

The next chapter, not surprisingly from Stephanie Sandler, presents fascinating insights into contemporary Russian poetry. She looks at the pseudonymous Nika Skandiaka, a digital mask with no original. Her main focus is Skandiaka’s translation of Randolph Healy’s poem Arbor Vitae. The poem is macaronic in the sense that it is a mix of different sign systems: computer code, Morse code, punctuation, scientific jargon and, centrally, sign language. This presents challenges for the translator as a code-within-a-code needs to be translated. Sandler then makes the connection with Skandiaka’s own poems in a way that shows how “she has opened up new possibilities for us to reflect on who we are, and how we are always translating” (76).

Next is a conversation between Uljana Wolf and Eugene Ostashevsky that brings together their experiences working and living in different languages and cultures. Particularly relevant is a connection they make between paronomasia and paranoia: “an oversaturation of semantic links (i.e., trauma) forges the apparition of perception of formal likeness even where it cannot be seen” (82).

Matthias Fechner’s chapter on machine translation adds an important element as any discussion of transitions in translation would be incomplete without some discussion of the topic. Fechner looks at how well Google Translate and DeepL handle a Franconian poem by Nico Helminger, with the result that they barely attempted to translate any of the text, and when they did they were frequently wrong (this was 2019). He postulates that any verse that can be correctly translated by machine—or easily understood in translation—might lack “a vital poetic quality” (112).

Rainer Grübel’s chapter on Vera Pavlova points out that translation theory can help improve the practice of translation, find answers to theoretical questions about translation, and help readers make judgements about translation. To that end, there are some lovely examples from Pavlova’s poems, such as what to do with the “you” in “Не как я хочу/но как ю” (139).

Adrian Wanner raises interesting questions about Joseph Brodsky’s autotranslations into English in relation to the same poems’ translation into German: who is better served, the reader of the English, or the German? It appears to depend on what you are looking for, but if you are seeking access to the Russian texts, you are better off with a German translation than one of Brodsky’s.

The conversation between Dmitry Kuzmin and Matvei Yankelevich sheds light on an underdiscussed aspect of translation: institutions, especially publishers. Both speak to the importance of small presses in publishing things larger presses will not, but also the financial pressures of doing so. A single grant or the extra discount Amazon takes from books can make or break a publisher.

Christian Soffel and Henrieke Stahl present one of the most fascinating examples with their analysis of Nataliia Azarova’s Project Du Fu, which combines Viktor Shklovskii, Walter Benjamin, Ezra Pound, and montage into a “compositional reenactment” that shows how a philological approach to translation can contribute to poetic tradition in the target language.

No discussion of poetic translation would be complete without Paul Celan. Alexandra Tretakov obliges with her discussion of Anna Glazova’s translations of Celan and her original poetry. Glazova’s verse, which betrays an influence from the start, becomes increasingly Celan-like, even down to her use of punctuation, which Tretakov discusses insightfully.

Maria Khotimsky cuts a broader swathe in “Translation and Translingualism in the Works of Contemporary Russophone American Poets.” This tightly-packed piece discusses the works of Olga Livshin, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Val Vinokur, and Eugene Ostashevsky, who intertwine the languages of their past. What Khotimsky says of Ostashevsky applies to the others: A multilingual poetics can “create new meaning through found resonance in words from different languages, and … use the translingual connections to unsettle ideological elements of language” (266).

The last conversation is between the poets Polina Barskova and Anna Glazova. After a discussion of metaphors of translation in their poetry, the talk reverses the telescope to examine the process of being translated. Conversations that occurred with their translators could eventually turn into new poems, illustrating the interrelationship of poetry and translation. As Glazova points out, “translation is probably the most effective way of learning how language works” (282). What better advice for an aspiring poet?

Finally, Eugene Ostashevsky closes the volume out with a coda, “The Return of the Non-Native,” which describes his poetic and literary travels between languages and countries. Along the way, he says something that serves as an overview of the entire volume: “Even to call that world ‘Russian’ is wrong, because in Russian there is no translation equivalent to the American word ‘Russian’” (297).

Space prevents teasing out the many echoes between the chapters, but the volume bears reading in full. The strength of the book is in the variety of its examples and the portrait it paints of Russian poetry and poetic translation rather than in its broader theoretical aspirations. The poems discussed can supply grist for many mills, and so will be of interest to anyone studying poetic translation, no matter the tradition.