Jamie Olson
Photo courtesy of Saint Martin’s University
Bio
Jamie Olson teaches in the English Department at Saint Martin’s University, a small Benedictine institution in Lacey, Washington. A native of northern Minnesota, he received his BA in English from the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth and his PhD from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he specialized in modern poetry. He writes about translation and Russian culture on his blog The Flaxen Wave, and his essays and translations from Russian have appeared in America Magazine, Asymptote, Translation Review, and 100 Poems about Moscow: An Anthology. Olson is currently at work on translations of two books by Timur Kibirov. He lives with his wife and daughter in Olympia.
As an English professor at a university where teaching and service are valued above all else, I often find it difficult to carve out time for translation. But my award from the National Endowment for the Arts signaled to my colleagues and students that the work I do as a translator is important too. More concretely, it allowed me to open up space in my schedule so that I could make headway on my project of translating the work of Timur Kibirov. After all, translation ain’t easy, and I can use whatever support I can get. As for the future, while I haven’t yet had the pleasure of publishing a book in translation, I’m optimistic that the prestige of my NEA Literature Fellowship will help me connect with a publisher soon, launching what I hope will be a long career as a literary translator.
Despite Timur Kibirov’s enormous reputation in Russia, his poetry is virtually unknown in English. He won Russia’s prestigious national “Poet” prize and received a Brodsky Fellowship in Rome, but a book of his poems has not yet been published anywhere in the English-speaking world. In fact, Kibirov is the only major Moscow conceptualist who hasn’t reached a British or American audience, which is especially mystifying given his engagement with the Anglo-American tradition, to include such figures as Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Vladimir Nabokov. He is a natural fit for English readers. Like most Russian poets, Kibirov only rarely writes in free verse, and I strive in my translations to reproduce the form of his poems—both meter and ghosts of rhyme—while keeping his mischievous tone and doing my best not to stray from a natural English idiom.
“A Note to the Reader” by Timur Kibirov
[Translated from the Russian]
Dear reader, come read about this—
about how the summer has passed,
how I’m no longer young or pleasant,
how I like the city much better,
though it’s prettier here in the forest,
how the weeping willows are drowsing,
how the shop got robbed yet again
and the robber will never be found,
how the potato harvest will fail,
how I’m dying, but not for real,
how I keep on living, like always,
like nothing has happened, unfazed,
how I shouldn’t be so damn lazy,
how I quit reading Baron Jomini
on page twenty-three of his opus,
how autumn will soon come to Moscow
to grumble and whine in unison
with me, how you see I’ve begun
to weep like one of those willows,
how I feel like an orphan without you,
my enlightened reader, my friend,
and when you ask the logical thing,
“Why the hell should I read about this?”—
as usual, I’ve got no response.
August 1996
About Timur Kibirov
Timur Kibirov, among the most influential of contemporary Russian poets, was born in 1955 and began publishing his work in the 1980s. His poems often feature playful reinterpretations of classic texts, including ancient myths, canonical literary works, Soviet ideology, and even scripture. In an interview, Kibirov once said, “The only thing that a poet needs to do is write good poems. What this means, I can’t begin to judge; no one can know this, there are no criteria… And whether a poet uses Old Church Slavonic or the current slang is simply a matter of technique.”