An Interview with Poet and Translator Sasha Dugdale

Abstract

This interview with poet and translator Sasha Dugdale discusses her early life as a Russian language learner, and her experiences of living in Russia in the 1990s where she worked for the British Council. It also covers her six year editorship of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. In the interview with poet Deryn Rees-Jones she discusses her understanding of the lyric I, her exploration of female voices in her poems, the influence of Russian writing on her work, and her current thinking about Keats and Wordsworth. There is also discussion of Dugdale’s recent poetry collection Deformations (2020) which includes her long sequence ‘Welfare Handbook’, about the abused daughters of the artist Eric Gill. The interview, which took place over email in February and March 2021, is accompanied by the first publication of ‘Psalm 137’, a new poem by Dugdale and an extract from her translation of Maria Stepanova’s long poem ‘Spolia’ from War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe, 2021).

Keywords:

• Sasha Dugdale
• translation
• Russian poetry
• Modern Poetry in Translation
• lyric ‘I’
• feminism
• British and Irish poetry
• Eric Gill
• Maria Stepanova