Laird, Sally

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LAIRD, Sally

PERSONAL: Born in England. Education: Attended Oxford University and Harvard University.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Carl Th. Dreyers vej 9, 8400 Ebeltoft, Denmark. E-mail—mail@absolute-english. dk.

CAREER: Author, translator, and editor. Absolute English (translating service), owner. Taught at European Film College in Denmark.

WRITINGS:

(Translator) Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue, Readers International, 1988.

(Translator) Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Time: Night, Virago Press (London, England), 1994.

(Translator) Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Immortal Love, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor) Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Translator) Semen Samuilovich Vilenski, Till My Tale Is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1999.

Editor of the journal Index on Censorship.

SIDELIGHTS: Sally Laird is a writer and editor and has also translated several works from the original Russian. One of her translation projects, The Queue, is a novel by author and illustrator Vladimir Sorokin that was described by Library Journal reviewer Mary F. Zirin as drawing on "avant-garde experiment and a flair for nonsense." Sorokin's English-language debut revolves around the dialogue and interaction of Soviet citizens waiting in line to buy products. The activities of the crowd include swearing, laughing, lovemaking, drinking, discussions about sports and diets, war and poetry. "People in the queue express themselves idiotically," wrote Zinovy Zinik, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, "not because they are all dimwitted, but because those who have joined the crowd are converted into simpletons who despise clever ideas and dignified speech." Zinik noted that works like Sorokin's are seldom printed in the Soviet Union and that Sorokin's devices "pose an enormous problem for a translator." Laird re-sets The Queue in suburban London during a time after the war. "This geographical and temporal leap strips the queuers' speech of its tawdry frills and exposes the ingenious logic with which Sorokin constructs his 'movable' dialogues," declared Zinik.

Laird has also translated The Time: Night and Immortal Love, two novels by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a Russian author born in 1938 whose early hardships established the groundwork for her writing. Helena Goscilo wrote in the Women's Review of Books that "her fiction and drama illustrate Tennessee Williams's tragic conviction that 'we're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.'" Petrushevskaya's writings were excluded from accepted Soviet literature for thirty years even though she received praise worldwide, and their appearance in English translation was well-received by critics.

The story of a woman who attempts to fill all of the roles requires of her and still retain her status as a poet, The Time is written in the form of notes. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that "while the facts of the story are relentlessly depressing, the author's signature black humor and matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis." Booklist contributor John Shreffler called The Time "a bleak portrait of Russian society and of the burdens carried by its women." Lesley Chamberlain, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, noted that the novel's "colloquial language" "is smoothly translated by Sally Laird. The writing is beautifully controlled and the spirit large."

Immortal Love, a collection of twenty-three stories and thirteen monologues, was written over twenty years and reflects the difficult lives of Russian women and girls. "What emerges from these loving, bitter portrayals is a literary experience, and a relationship to literature, that is by turns empty and sublime," wrote Jessica Garrison, reviewing Laird's translation in the Nation. Hesba Stretton commented in New Statesman that "each piece is cast as urban folk tale, told with the compulsion of gossip. Many end with the bland and unsettling wisdom of 'and that's just the way it is.'"

Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers is a collection of Laird's interviews conducted from 1987 to 1994. The older writers, born during the 1920s and 1930s, include Petrushevskaya, Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander, and Vladimir Makanin. The next generation, born from the 1940s to the 1950s, are Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya, Yevgeny Popov, Zufar Gareyev, and Igor Pomerantsev. The youngest writer, Viktor Pelevin, was born in 1962. Laird's bibliography lists English translations by these writers. Writing in Choice, Goscilo called the collection "splendid," the interviews "engrossing," and commented that Laird's prose "is crisp and lucid, her translations fully idiomatic . . . The interviews brim with unexpected and eloquent insights." Times Literary Supplement contributor John Weightman wrote of the authors: "Being Russian intellectuals with the stamina of survivors, they respond with gusto, just as some of them vigorously subvert the canons of Soviet decency in their writings." Weightman advised that "in most of the interviews, the tone is resolutely cheerful. . . . On the one hand, these Russians are very conscious of the amorphousness and backwardness of their huge country and of their non-European characteristics. . . . On the other hand, apart from the issue of freedom of expression, they display no great keenness to adapt to the more coherent nature of Western society." Karen Rosenberg, a reviewer in Nation, commented that "Laird has captured a fascinating era beginning before the breakup of the Soviet Union and continuing today, in which questions of identity are hotly debated. This has been a struggle not only between parties but inside individuals, as revealed by contradictions within the interviews." Rosenberg concluded that Voices of Russian Literature "is not just a companion volume to contemporary Russian fiction. Laird . . . has . . . set literature in a philosophical and political context. So although her book concerns Russian authors, it will be intelligible and interesting to those who have only the vaguest acquaintance with them—no mean feat."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 1994, John Shreffler, review of The Time: Night, p. 2024; March 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Immortal Love, p. 1239.

Choice, December, 1999, Helena Goscilo, review of Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers, p. 729.

Library Journal, June 15, 1988, Mary F. Zirin, review of The Queue, p. 69; July, 1994, M. Anna Falbo, review of The Time: Night, p. 129; April 1, 1996, Olivia Opello, review of Immortal Love, p. 121.

Nation, June 10, 1996, Jessica Garrison, review of Immortal Love, p. 32; October 18, 1999, Karen Rosenberg, "Their Myths and Ours," review of Voices of Russian Literature, p. 28.

New Statesman, March 3, 1995, Hesba Stretton, review of Immortal Love, p. 39.

New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1983, Steven V. Roberts, "Congress: Slowly, a New Awareness of Women," p. 12; October 2, 1988, Tom Swick, review of The Queue, p. 26; September 11, 1994, Ken Kalfus, review of The Time: Night, p. 25; June 16, 1996, review of Immortal Love, p. 32.

Publishers Weekly, May 13, 1988, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Queue, p. 269; July 4, 1994, review of The Time: Night, p. 51.

Review of Contemporary Literature, spring, 2001, Michael Pinker, review of The Time: Night, p. 199.

Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1988, Zinovy Zinik, "A Russian Monster," review of The Queue, p. 698; February 4, 1994, Lesley Chamberlain, "Worn out and Worn Down," review of The Time: Night, p. 25; August 20, 1999, John Weightman, "You Have to Weep," review of Voices of Russian Literature, p. 22.

Women's Review of Books, December, 1994, Helena Goscilo, "The Unbearable Heaviness of Being," p. 19.*