Made Under Pressure describes the literary translation process in the postwar Soviet Union, from the selection of works to be translated to their censorship and publication, including translations of John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner. The book provides an invaluable insider's look through extensive interviews with literary translators of the time. Natalia Kamovnikova herself calls her research “a story of passion” and “a story of friendship”—the passion of the translators and editors whose interviews she meticulously documented, and the friendships she made with the talented people who, as Kamovnikova puts it, “breathed life” into the book.
Literary translation in the USSR played a particular role. Behind the Iron Curtain, the only way to learn about other countries was often through translation. Leningrad and Moscow were the main centers of literary translation in Soviet Russia, and the book focuses on translation activity in these two...
