Mikhail Yasnov

Mikhail Davidovich Yasnov was born on January 8, 1946, in Leningrad. In 1970, he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad University. Since 1982, he has been a member of the Writers’ Union. He is currently a member of the Council of the Writers’ Union of St. Petersburg, chairman of the literary translation section of the Writers’ Union, head of the literary translation studio at the French Institute in St. Petersburg, and a member of PEN Club.

In 2002, he was awarded a Diploma of Honor by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) for his translation of Pierre Gripari’s Tales of the Broca Street. In 2003, he received the Maurice Waxmacher Literary Prize, awarded by the French government and the French Embassy in Moscow for the best translation of French fiction. The prize recognized the book of translations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s prose, The Rotting Sorcerer. The Murdered Poet (2002).

He is the author of six books of lyric poetry, more than thirty books of poetry and prose for children, as well as numerous translations, chiefly from French poetry. He prepared and in part translated the most complete volumes in Russia, with respect to both contents and commentary, of the poetry and prose of Guillaume Apollinaire (1994, 1999, 2002), Jacques Prévert (1994), Paul Verlaine (1999), Paul Valéry (2000), Jean Cocteau (2000, 2003), and a two-volume edition of Eugène Ionesco (1999). He prepared for publication and annotated Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in the series Literary Monuments (1997). In 2000, the Azbuka publishing house’s Azbuka-Classics series released a fully prepared and translated bilingual edition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems, The Mirabeau Bridge. He translated from French the prose books Conversations with Dmitry Vyacheslavovich Ivanov (1999), Moses. Our Contemporary by Jean Blot (2001), The Rotting Sorcerer. The Murdered Poet by G. Apollinaire (2002), The Collector of Shadows by Jean-Marie Le Sidaner (2002), and Paris Pedestrian by L.-P. Fargue (2004). He