Elaine Feinstein
Martyn Crucefix Timothy Adès
presenting translations of
~ Marina Tsvetaeva ~ R M Rilke ~ Victor Hugo ~
Thursday 30 May at 7pm
at Waterstones
68 Hampstead High Street, London NW3
Entry £6 (£4 with Waterstones Card) ~ phone 0207 798 1094
Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, which won three translation awards from the Arts Council, were published from 1971 to 2009. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies, including the critically acclaimed A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias was published in 2005.
Martyn Crucefix works as poet, teacher, reviewer, critic, translator and competition judge. He is a tutor with the Poetry School in London, co-founded the group ShadoWork which performs and writes collaboratively, and is Head of English at Brampton College. His five collections are Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990), On Whistler Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson 1994: his other books are all from Enitharmon), A Madder Ghost (1997), An English Nazareth (2004) and Hurt (2010). His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (2006) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as ‘unlikely to be bettered for very many years… it deserves to become the standard English edition worldwide.’ (Magma). He now also has transalted Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2012). Of his Duino Elegies, George Szirtes said: ‘…substantial, powerful and necessary work. Readers may well fall in love with parts of it and regard the Crucefix Rilke as their life partner.’
Timothy Adès is a rhyming translator-poet, working mainly from French, Spanish, and German. His books to date are: How to be a Grandfather, Victor Hugo’s last book of poems (Hearing Eye, complete edition 2012) and two selections of Jean Cassou: 33 Sonnets of the Resistance (Arc Publications) and The Madness of Amadis (Agenda Editions). Timothy has won awards for all these poets, among them the John Dryden Prize, and also the TLS Premio Valle-Inclán Prize for the Mexican, Alfonso Reyes. Other favourites are Brecht, Sikelianós, Nerval, Louise Labé, Ricarda Huch, and the Venezuelan, Alberto Arvela. He is widely published, and many of his translations are on the Brindin website. Timothy also writes lipograms (texts written under constraint, e.g. avoiding the letter e).
