GAYANE MURADYAN

Residence:

Residencies SDK

Graduated from the Physics Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University, she worked for several years in her specialty, at the same time she was engaged in technical translations, as well as translations of non-fiction and fiction from English.

 

 

Gayane Muradyan and Elena Barzova about themselves:

 

“As usual, we translate texts in tandem, so we should like to start the story about ourselves not from the individual biographies, but from the moment, when we started working together.

1995 year. At that moment the Moscow “AST” was a new dynamically developing publishing house, and we both worked there as the managing editors responsible for a publication of the American and English literature of various genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, non-fiction, thrillers, detectives … Then, over time, “serious” fiction was added – a novelties and classics, as well as philosophy, psychology, history of science …

In 1996, we were lucky enough to discover for the Russian reader the first books of Andrzej Sapkowski and later publish the entire cycle «Saga o wiedźminie» translated by Eugene Weisbrot,  and then the other books, that have appeared over the years.

Working for many years as an editor with such an excellent translator is a very rewarding and interesting experience. Especially at that case if you are not a Polish philologist, and you studied the language by reading books, while communicating on trips to Poland, for a short time with a teacher, but mostly on your own. In 1999 it was Weisbrot who offered us to translate Sapkowski’s story “The Musicians” ourselves. So in tandem we began to translate more as a joke – we are two editors, but there is only one story… And later it became a tradition for us.

Thanks to the Sapkowski’s  success, we were able to offer the Russian reader not only Polish fantasy, but also the books by authors such as Olga Tokarczuk, Stefan Chwin, Katarzyna Grochola and others. So the advice and recommendations from the renowned experts on Polish literature were urgently needed at this stage. Soon we found such an expert Ksenia Staroselskaya. And in August 2000 she invited us to her seminar for the novice Polish translators at the “Instytut Polski w Moskwie”, since, fortunately, we already had one published story. The seminar lasted more than ten years and every year we collectively translated some collection of stories by a Polish author (the first was Kornel Filipowicz, then Józef Hen, Tadeusz Różewicz, Olga Tokarczuk, Jerzy Sosnowski, Stanisław Lem, Józef Czapski, Janusz Leon Wiśniewski and others). This school allowed seminarians to try their hand at independent translations.

For a while we tried to combine publishing and translation activities, but in 2013 we completely switched to freelancing. In recent years, we have been mainly translating, writing articles, also cooperate with an online magazine «Новая Польша» and doing various publishing projects. We are still trying to find and offer Polish authors unknown here to Russian publishers.”