Last year I posted about the International Translation Center/Cardinal Points annual Compass Award contest, which was dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva; this year the award (webpage) is dedicated to the work of Maria Petrovykh:
Petrovykh was a poet of exquisite precision and subtlety – a friend of Osip Mandelstam, serving as an inspiration for his famed “Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov,” and of Anna Akhmatova, who called her “Naznach’ mne svidan’e na etom svete” a “lyric masterpiece.” Yet, unlike her fellow masters, she hasn’t attained universal recognition. In part, this is due to her own humility; she published only one collection in her lifetime, and devoted most of her professional life to editing and translating the work of others. We feel it is high time for Petrovykh’s own verse to benefit from the attention of translators as gifted and inspired as she herself was.
I discovered Petrovykh a few years ago and was impressed enough to create that Wikipedia article; I’m very pleased she’s getting this recognition, and I thank Irina Mashinski (a wonderful poet herself) for letting me know about it.
a very good Wikipedia article too. I was wondering if it were you, because the first time I looked there wasn’t one in English.
Thanks!