Awarded the Heldt Prize for best women’s work in Slavic Studies in 2000
Reviews
- “[A.L.]‘s new translation of ‘The Ratcatcher’ makes available a crucial work in 20th-century Russian poetry, frames it with copious and responsible detail, and best of all conveys its value as a work of art and entertainment.”
Sibelan Forrester, Slavic and East European Journal, Spring, 2003
- “[A.L.] is not only a meticulous scholar of Russian poetry . . . she is also unusually sensitive to cadence and form. So it is that this version of ‘The Ratcatcher’ reads like a poem written in the English language.”
Elaine Feinstein, Poetry London, Spring, 2000
- “Tsvetaeva’s wonderful sense of rhythm and her savage satire are rendered unerringly into English by [A.L.]. Her translation makes reading Tsvetaeva’s fairy-tale-with-bite effortless and immensely satisfying.”
Nicholas Lezard, Guardian, 16 October 1999
- “In a finely tuned line of verse in the target language the style of the original begins to tremble with life, the original shines through the dense layers of a foreign linguistic element and stands on a level with it. This was my experience when I read Angela Livingstone’s translation of Tsvetaeva’s poem The Ratcatcher.”
Sergey Nikolayev, Rostov State University, Literaturnaya gazeta, 9-15 February 2000
- “For the first time, we have a readable Tsvetaeva which persuades us that she must have been a very great poet.”
Lachlan Mackinnon, TLS, 19 May 2000
- “An indispensable first complete translation of a remarkable poem.”
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen, May 2000
- “Angela Livingstone’s rendering of this rhythmically and lexically extremely complex work is outstandingly good, often matching the rhythmic and semantic inventiveness of the original.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 38 issue 2, 2002
- “Livingstone takes full advantage of her grasp of Tsvetaeva’s authorial features and reveals a nuanced appreciation of the original poem’s energy and intelligence, along with her own considerable poetic gifts and sense of fun.”
Slavic and East European Journal, Spring 2003
Performances
A Rehearsed Reading of a shortened version of my translation of Tsvetaeva’s ‘Ratcatcher’ was performed by a group of professional actors to an audience of about fifty people at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Square, London, on November 12th 2015; it was repeated at Sands Film Studios, Rotherhithe, South London, on May 6th 2016. On both occasions the producer was Larissa Itina (organiser of the ‘Anglo-Russian Culture Club’), the director was Jeremy Browne, and the actors (all professionals) were: Kristin Milward, Richard Evans, Malcolm Ward, Stephen Omer. For the May 6th occasion, Yana Lyapunova read the Russian scene-settings, and there was music by Nic Rowley.