A Poetic Dialogue of Translators

As last year, the Yiddish section of the 7th International Winter School of Translation at St. Petersburg State University was held by Yoel Matveyev, Lyubov Lavrova, and Olga Matvienko. This time, the lecturers engaged in a poetic dialogue about two Jewish poets who lived in Birobidzhan.

Matveyev spoke about his work on his Yiddish translations of Rilke. Lavrova talked about her participation in the Yiddish authors’ database on the website of the Congress of Jewish Culture (CJC), an international Yiddish organization founded in 1948. The database is available in both Yiddish and English. Olga Matvienko spoke about her recent translations of poems about Birobidzhan and the Jewish Autonomous Region, which she translated into Russian.

Works by Henekh Koyfman and Aaron Kushnirov that she liked were previously translated by Yoel Matveyev. Both versions have now been published by the newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.