“Solidarity and Sacrifice: Poetry Translation and the Russian Radical Left,” Brian Baer, Kent State University

This paper explores the central role played by translation--and, in particular, by the translation of poetry--among members of Russia’s radical left in the nineteenth century. The paper will focus on the various functions of poetry translation in that historical context in order to outline a model for studying translation within the overall interpretive network that shapes both its production and reception.

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is author of the monograph Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (2009) and editor of the collected volumes Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011) and Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology (2013). He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies, and his monograph Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature is forthcoming in the Bloomsbury series Literatures, Cultures, Translation.