Timothy Sergay

Biography

Timothy Sergay is a scholar and translator of Russian with many years’ experience translating Russian historical, journalistic, and literary texts. He acquired rather too many MA degrees in Russian language and literature—from the University of Michigan, Middlebury College Russian School/Pushkin Institute of Russian Language, and Yale University—, and eventually completed a PhD from Yale (2008) with a dissertation on Boris Pasternak’s Christian sensibility. He currently teaches UAlbany’s elementary Russian sequence and introductory survey courses on Russian literature and contemporary Russian affairs. He has published articles in both English and Russian on Russian poetry, translation theory and criticism, and the theory and practice of verse translation. His literary translations include an annotated English edition of the “memoiristic novel” by Aleksandr Chudakov (1938–2005), A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps, as yet unpublished. His latest publications are translations of poems by Aleksandr Tvardovsky and Andrei Voznesensky in 400 Years of Poems About Moscow, ed. Maxim Amelin (Moscow: OGI, forthcoming), and “Two Songs by Vladimir Vysotsky: Singable and ‘Obolenskian’ Approaches to Translating the Songs of Vladimir Vysotsky” (Delos 32 [2017], 28–39).

Research Interest

Russian language; Russian-English translation; 20th century Russian literature