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Translating Russian Poetry

Wednesday 11th June 2008, 14:30-15:30, Room S0.11, Social Studies Building

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Guest Seminar led by Daniel Weissbort
  • Translating Russian Poetry

Daniel Weissbort was educated at St. Paul’s School, London and Cambridge University, where he was a History Exhibitioner at Queens’ College. In 1965, with the late Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, he founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, also known as MPT, which he edited up to 2004, producing a series of often groundbreaking anthologies, including French, Turkish, Italian, Iranian, Israeli & Palestinian, Welsh, etc.

In the early 70’s he went to America where he directed the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation, at the University of Iowa for over thirty years. He has published anthologies of Russian poetry and of East European poetry , as well as several collections of his own poetry. His translational memoir of the late Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love, was published by Anvil Press and he has co-edited for Oxford University Press, a historical reader in translation theory.

For OUP he is currently writing a book on Ted Hughes & Translation, having edited for Faber & Faber and Farrar Straus & Giroux a volume, Selected Translations of Ted Hughes. He is also preparing, for Arc, a second volume of translations of Inna Lisnianskaya and Semyon Lipkin, from Russian. Weissbort is or has been on various boards, including the Poetry International Committee (UK) responsible for the series of International poetry readings in London, of which he was co-director.

He taught a translation workshop, in 2002, at the University of Warwick, for The Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth. He is Professor (Emeritus) English & Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, Research Fellow in the English Department at King’s College London University, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

This event is open to all - Attendance is free of charge