Timothy Sergay

Academic Focus

Research: 20th century Russian poetry, especially Pasternak and Blok; Silver Age culture in general; translation theory and criticism; theory and practice of verse translation; Russian religious philosophy; Russian music and musicology; the Russian “guitar poets” of the 1960s to the present; Russian and Soviet film.

Bio

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, film, 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), Anton:  A Novelistic Idyll, under contract with Northwestern University Press. His recent publications include translations of poetry by Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Boris Slutsky, and Bulat Okudzhava in Poems from the Front: A Moscow Anthology, edited by Skvortsov and Young (Moscow: B.S.G.-Press, forthcoming in 2021); and an essay in the history of linguistics, “Jakobson, Whorf, and the Fractal Vision of Language,” in Living through Literature, edited by Hansen et al. (Uppsala, 2019).