Alyssa Dinega Gillespie
Photo by Dennis Griggs, Tannery Hill Studios
Bio
Alyssa Dinega Gillespie is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. She has won top prizes in several international competitions for the translation of Russian poetry into English, and her translations have been featured in New England Review, Atlantic Review, Cardinal Points Journal, and Pushkin Review,among others. She recently collaborated with composer Mark Abel on the first-ever solo song cycle of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems in English (Delos, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, 2020). Gillespie is the author of the scholarly books A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (2001; Russian translation, 2015) and Pushkin’s Poetic Imagination (in Russian, 2021), and the editor of Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (2012). She has worked as a professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Notre Dame and Bowdoin College. Her collection of Tsvetaeva’s poems is forthcoming in the Russian Library series of Columbia University Press.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Russian of selected poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), considered one of the most renowned Russian poets of the 20th century. During the Russian Civil War, while her husband was fighting as an officer of the White Army, she lived in poverty in Moscow. Her younger daughter died of starvation during a famine in the winter of 1919-20. This selected poetry spans her creative lifetime, with particular emphasis on her poems from the 1920s.
I have been translating Tsvetaeva’s poems almost since I first encountered them, during my first sojourn in the Soviet Union in winter-spring 1990. They were a revelation to me then, and they remain so even now. Since that time, I have devoted much of my scholarly and creative energy to making Tsvetaeva more accessible (in a variety of senses) to both Russophone and Anglophone readers. However, until recently, my work as a translator was a passion project that I tried to fit into the periphery of my busy life as an academic and teacher-scholar, rather than a pursuit that I allowed to take center stage. As time has gone on, I have regretted this imbalance and have gradually begun making more room for translation—which I love very much—alongside my scholarly research and writing. This wonderful grant from the National Endowment for the Arts feels like a validation of my shift in priorities.
My NEA project is a book-length collection of Tsvetaeva’s selected poems, some of which have been translated previously, others not. In my view, a keen attention to sound orchestration is one of the chief attributes of Tsvetaeva’s poetics. My approach to translating her verse is distinctive in that it is very much based in music, rhythm, sound, voice, and form; naked semantics is only one of the elements I strive to convey, and not always the paramount one. Instead of thinking in terms of word-for-word semantic equivalents, I try to imagine how Tsvetaeva herself, with her poetic sensibilities intact, might have rendered her impulse in a given poem into English, as opposed to Russian. I am immensely grateful for the NEA’s support of my project and, in particular, for this recognition of the value of retranslating and expanding the English-language corpus of a poet of major stature.