Dr. Anne O. Fisher’s translation of Ksenia Buksha's novel The Freedom Factory (awarded Russia’s 2014 National Bestseller prize) is forthcoming from Phoneme Media in March 2018. A postmodern reimagining of the Soviet production novel, The Freedom Factory weaves together tales told by factory workers, managers, engineers, and janitors to create the (lightly fictionalized) history of a real military plant in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg from the Nazi bombardment in WWII to the present day. Buksha deploys an array of challenging techniques to construct an insightful portrait of Soviet and post-Soviet life that is, appropriately, both hilarious and heartbreaking. Fisher will read from the novel, followed by a question and answer session about her translation and the work of translating literature in general.
Fisher has also translated works by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Andrey Platonov, Nilufar Sharipova, and Margarita Meklina. With co-translator Derek Mong, Fisher won an NEA Translation Grant to support work on contemporary Russian poet Maxim Amelin’s verse; their renderings have appeared in Asymptote, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Lines, the International Poetry Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Fisher has served as translation editor for two collections: Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction, ed. Yvonne Howell (Russian Life Books, 2015) and 100 Poems about Moscow: An Anthology, ed., coll. Artyom Skvortsov (OGI: Moscow, 2017). She is currently translating Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s A Poetics of Titles and, with Margarita Meklina, curating a folio of Russian LGBTQ poetry and prose. Fisher received her PhD in Russian literature from the University of Michigan and lives in Indiana.
Co-sponsored by University Libraries.
