Tori: Hello listeners! Today I am here with Catherine Keough, the winner of the 2025 Aetna Prize for Translations. She recently translated a work by Grigory Sluzhitel, titled The Days of Saveli, and today we’re going to talk about her piece and her work with writing translations. Hi Catherine, do you mind introducing yourself?
Catherine: Yeah, no problem. So I’m an English graduate student. I’m in my second year of the MA PhD program, so second year of course work, one more before I start dissertating style. And I’m from Western Massachusetts, so not too far from here.
Tori: Wow, Western Mass. So a little bit of a drive, but I heard it’s a great area. So before getting into your piece, I’d love to know a little bit more about your relationship with language, culture, and writing. So where did you learn Russian? Do you have a background? Is your first language Russian or English, and what was your learning process like for either of these languages?
Catherine: Yeah, of course. So I did my undergrad in Russian. I will admit that was a long time ago. I graduated from my undergrad in 2011 at Smith College in Northampton, and I started taking Russian, well I started taking it my last year of high school, but I just wanted something a little different that I could start exploring once I got to university. So that was what I chose.
Really, there was no reason, but I immediately really enjoyed it. I got to study abroad there in Russian, in St. Petersburg, in about 2008, 2009, and I really didn’t work on keeping up my language skills that much in between my degrees. So I only started here a couple years ago. So there was a big gap between my undergrad and my graduate education, but I did keep reading a little bit. And then when I got here, because there is the literary translation certificate, I just decided that might be a great opportunity for me to get a little bit back into it and start practicing and building those skills up again.
Tori: Wow, that’s really interesting. So how did you keep up with language in the meantime?
Catherine: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, honestly, it was just in bits and pieces. So I might listen to some podcasts. There’s amazing resources on the internet. So listening to podcasts, watching films, I have a decent number of books in Russian, so I can read some there. Those are probably the primary ways that I was keeping up with it, but I wouldn’t say I was absurdly diligent over the many years that I was out of school. But it’s a fun hobby, so I kept up. And of course, there’s those language apps like Duolingo and things, you can always play with those too. I mess around with those occasionally.
Tori: Yeah. So currently, I’m a minor in German, and I’m also taking a language, German, at university. And so, you know, I’m building my fluency, biliteracy. And so would you say that the tips to watch movies, engage with literature, listen to podcasts, would you say that these are good tips for those looking for language acquisition? Language acquisition is in huge demand right now, and people like me want to know how you and people like you were able to execute this so flawlessly.
Catherine: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach it. I think that one of the things that I really didn’t do a lot of in my undergrad that I’m doing now is the translation work. And I really actually think that’s a really excellent component to learning language as well, because translating really insists that you sit very deeply with the text and that you’re looking at every single word and how they come together. So I think that things like playing on the language apps or doing conversational exercises in class or listening to music, they’re all amazing ways to build your own language capacity and also ability to have conversational experiences with folks in other languages. But the translation work really allows you to sit very deeply with the words and with the grammar in a way that for a language geek like me is really fun and entertaining.
Tori: Well, I’m glad. You’re definitely really making me want to hop back on Duolingo and engage with more German movies and literature because I feel like I’m falling behind now. I’m in the presence of someone with so much dedication and so much inspiring work that it’s honestly amazing.
And I’m so glad you’re sitting here with me today. So I’d actually like you to read the first paragraph of The Days of Saveli so viewers can really capture this amazing execution of language interpretation that we’ve both been referring to.
Catherine: Yeah, so I will say that the excerpt I chose isn’t the immediate first part of the novel, but it’s in the first few pages. The first part actually starts before the cat is born and he’s describing his experience inside of his mother’s womb. So this is a little bit further in, but also I think a starting point. So here we go:
The Days of Saveli (Translated)
Mama gave birth to me, my brother, and my two sisters in June. Her delivery was smooth and swift; sensing that it was beginning, she tucked herself away beneath a tarp-covered Zaporozhets and prepared to wait. The car had stood in one place for many years, and the asphalt below the wheels had sunken down and the canvas hood was worn away in places. The Zaporozhets had no steering wheel, nor seats, nor headlights, nor ashtrays, nor pedals, nor window cranks, nor any internal organs. It stood like this, picked clean and stripped of everything, like the corpse of a wild animal lying in the forest. Where was its owner now? This is what my mother thought about while waiting to give birth. A sun shower began, and by the time it passed we had been born.
Tori: Wow, that’s chilling. And so how did this specific excerpt, how did it speak to you?
Catherine: What I liked about this excerpt in particular is a lot of the little details and I think this excerpt is really a smaller vision of the novel itself. The novel is full of very, very specific details and very visceral, sensorial details that the cat is describing, and, in this case, we get this very detailed precise sense of the car.
Zaporozhets is an old Soviet car and so the mother drags herself underneath it and we just get this beautiful image of this car that’s completely just a shell, a rusty, empty thing, but that it becomes this place of life and birth for this cat who brings her children there and who spends a very important moment of her life there. So something that’s been abandoned by people and forgotten and seemingly unimportant but it comes a really meaningful place in the life of these animals.
Tori: Yeah, so this speaks definitely sparks some philosophical questions about the parallels of life and death and what life means and how it is created. And it’s frankly just gorgeous how this is executed through a cat and through a vessel that typically when people think of life and being born, we tend to skip over the life and birth of even animals. So where did you find this original piece? Is it a really popular work in Russia?
Catherine: Yeah, that’s a great question. I found the book simply by doing what a lot of us do, which is going on Google, and I was looking for contemporary books that had come out in Russia. I was looking for something that I could work on in my translation practice, and I wanted something by a contemporary writer, something that was new, and something that also was popular there because I knew then, okay, if it’s well received there, there’s a good chance it’ll be something that people enjoy here as well. And so this book, which is called The Days of Saveli, that’s the name of the cat, Saveli, this book actually did win a number of prizes in Russia in 2019.
It was published in 2018, and it was really well received, I think, because the subject matter is very relatable. The story is really about this cat who is spending his life roaming around Moscow, engaging with different humans, engaging with different animals. He has some very deep relationships with them, and we also get a lot of backstories of a lot of these human and animal characters. And so just really it’s a story of the everyday life of people and animals and of a city. And I think that a lot of folks can relate to that in their own places that they live in their own cities and their own relationships with animals and people.
Tori: Wow, that’s really well said. Is there any aspect of Saveli in this cat that you relate to on some personal level?
Catherine: Yeah, I could say that he’s a really strange cat. You might have gotten a sense of it in the first paragraph there, but he is precocious and very intellectual from even before his birth. He is born with his eyes open, which of course isn’t normal for cats. They’re usually born with their eyes closed. And this seems to be related to the fact that he is kind of aged beyond his years, really. He’s almost like some kind of philosophy professor in the guise of a kitten.
And I don’t know if I relate to that. I don’t know that I walk around looking at the world like a philosophy professor, but there is something very endearing about this intellectualizing of the whole world around him. But he still is very playful and childlike. He gets so much delight out of silly things like music and puddles and banana boxes. But at the same time, the way he speaks about it is sometimes very philosophical and deep and well beyond his years.
Tori: Yeah, it’s also interesting to me how so many people relate and love to engage with overly simplistic and simple characters. But this is a funny situation where he is both very simple and has these wants and basic needs that he pursues in an almost childish manner, but then also has that philosophical thought, where he’s thinking what his mother thinks as he’s being birthed. And it’s really beautiful. And I think that’s that’s such a fun play in such an entertaining read.
How did your skill as a translator, as we were talking before, how does this intersect with your skills as a writer? Were there any notable executive decisions specifically on word choicing?
Catherine: Yeah, I think there’s a number of places in the novel that are very descriptive. And therefore, there’s a lot of leeway with the way you could go about translating things. One of the things that I wanted to make sure when I was translating it is that I’m not just necessarily being so literal that it becomes unreadable for an English audience. It’s really easy to translate things so literally, grammar-wise and word-wise, is that the text can sound like something that is not necessarily natural to an English speaker’s ear or whatever language you’re translating into.
And sometimes maybe you don’t want it to sound completely natural. I mean, it is a translated text. We don’t want to erase the fact that it is coming from another language, it’s coming from another culture. But at the same time, we want the text to be something that you can sit down and read and enjoy. So that was definitely something that I was thinking about a lot. There’s some lovely parts of the text, there’s a portion where the kittens are born and they’re all sticky and gooey. And the way that I kind of came about phrasing that was that they were all stuck together like a clump of lozenges, which of course, those were the words that I was translating, but I just loved that imagery.
It’s something that if I was writing a text like this myself, it would never occur to me to describe newborn kittens as a clump of gooey lozenges. But the fact that that was the image that the author conjured and then for me to come across that, it’s like a lovely surprise because you’re reading and you’re translating and then you come across something and you’re like, what is this? And it’s really fun to be able to render these moments into English and to be delighted and surprised by the imagery that the author has chosen and to get the opportunity and the honor to bring that into a translated version of the text is really exciting. So I’d say there’s a lot of moments that this text lends itself to that are like that.
Tori: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I like how that description almost reminds me of a sort of dirty realism where it kind of mixes the grotesque and the reality and it’s really interesting to watch and read. And so lastly, what was your reaction to winning the 2025 Aetna Prize for translations? That’s a great question.
Catherine: I was pleasantly surprised, and I don’t know who I first told. I probably emailed my translation professor, Peter Constantine, who is the head of the translation program here at UConn. He had encouraged me to submit my work, so I’m sure I let him know very quickly. And I think that I also, of course, let my family know. So my mother was very excited.
But it wasn’t something that I was necessarily expecting. Like I said, I have just jumped back into working very seriously with Russian and with translation in the past couple years. And so diving into it has been a new and exciting experience and it was really exciting to get this kind of award so immediately into my beginning this practice.
Tori: Sounds great to hear. And since receiving the award, have you engaged more with Russian literature, working on your speech?
Catherine: Yeah, I’ve been looking for a lot of other things that I could potentially translate in the future. One of the things that I find incredibly difficult to translate is poetry. I have a hard time just sitting with poetry in English. I find it like really beautiful, but also really challenging to work with. But I think there’s a lot of opportunities to keep learning and growing. It’s not a not a empty or short practice here.
Tori: Yeah, I’d say language learning definitely isn’t short or linear. But it’s great to hear that from someone who has so much experience in the field. I’m so glad I could sit down with you today and have you share your experiences on translations and building language through culture. And I really appreciate the time that you took to come here. I’d like to thank WHUS Studio for allowing the Long River Rewind to use this studio. And I’d like to thank Catherine for being on the show and sharing her experiences with us.