Not lost in translation

Professor Emerita Christina Kramer and U of T alum Rawley Grau were honoured with the 2025 International Dragi Award last month for their translation of works of Macedonian poet Aco Šopov (1923–1982).

Launched in 2022 and named after Dragi Mihajlovski (1951–2022) — an esteemed Macedonian writer, translator, essayist, and university professor — the award is presented annually for the most significant translation of a literary work by a Macedonian author.

Kramer and Grau translated a large selection of Šopov’s poetry from Macedonian, which was published by Deep Vellum Press as the book The Long Coming of the Fire in 2023. This is the first major edition of Šopov’s works in English. The selection, which spans 40 years, covers a wide variety of themes — from celebrating the cosmos, to the beauty of nature, to the theme of love.

“The award was completely unexpected, completely out of the blue,” says Kramer, a professor emerita in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures.

“Of course, I was delighted,” says Grau, a former graduate student in Slavic languages and literatures at U of T, who has worked as a translator in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, since the early 2000s. “But at the time I didn’t fully realize just how important the award was within the world of Macedonian literature.”

How did this project come to life?

“The entire project was born out of the COVID pandemic, as Šopov’s daughter, Jasmina Šopova, prepared for the centennial anniversary of her father’s birth,” says Kramer. “It was this intense three-year collaboration by email while we were all in lockdown.”

Šopova first contacted Kramer, who then suggested they add Grau to the team. Kramer and Grau first met in the late 1980s when he was a graduate student and she had recently joined U of T’s faculty.

“Jasmina brought this team together,” says Kramer. “I know Macedonian very well. Jasmina is a tremendous scholar of her father's poetry, and Rawley is a wonderful translator and interpreter of poetry. Everybody had the piece that the other person needed.”

With Grau in Ljubljana, Šopova in Paris and Kramer in Toronto, the trio exchanged sometimes almost daily emails and met frequently online to bring Šopov’s work to an English audience.

“There was a lot of discussion, a lot of back and forth because we were still making changes and arguing and discussing until the book went to press,” says Kramer. “It was just a remarkable and very unusual translation experience.”

“It was one of the best collaborations I've had in my life,” adds Grau.

“Christina is extremely knowledgeable about Macedonia and Macedonian culture, and particularly about the language. So I knew I was dealing with someone who had vast knowledge about a subject that I had almost no knowledge of.”

He also greatly appreciated working with Šopov’s daughter.

“It's very important to have feedback from native speakers because you might not understand something, or you might take something the wrong way,” he says.

“Jasmina is the most knowledgeable person about her father's poetry. She has devoted a large portion of her life to collecting everything that's been published about him, as well as academic studies.”

What also made the project so enjoyable was the fact that he genuinely loved Šopov’s poetry.

“I feel like he is certainly one of the great modernist poets of Europe,” says Grau.

“It's very difficult to translate something if you don't feel close to what you're translating. You need to have a sympathy with that work. And for translating poetry, a novel — or any kind of literary work — you must be able to channel the author or inhabit the author's thoughts as much as you can.”

He goes on to explain, “You inhabit the work itself, not necessarily the author, but the vision — the conceptual world that the author is creating. You have to fully immerse yourself to really understand how the words and the meanings are connected.”

Šopova felt that Kramer and Grau truly understood her father’s work, and was just as thrilled with their Dragi award.

“This news was a source of joy and pride for me and foremost for my friends Christina and Rawley, who put all their knowledge, expertise, and talent into this exceptional translation,” she says.

“It was a very enriching experience for me too. I was — and still am — in awe of their attention to every detail, every little nuance of every word, the visual image it produces, its sound, and the connections it makes with other words to create not only a poem, but an entire poetic universe.”

In fact, their translations helped Šopova see her father’s poetry in a new light.

“Their translation helped me better understand certain passages in my father's work that seemed simple or obvious to me in Macedonian but turned out to be much less simple and less obvious when it came to conveying them in another language,” she says. “In short, Christina and Rawley opened up new horizons for me in this poetry that I thought I knew perfectly well.”

She hopes this English translation as well as the publicity around the award “will inspire new translations into other languages and attract the attention of English-speaking students and researchers.”

In addition to the award, Kramer cherishes the reconnection with Grau and feels this is an example of the fruitful endeavours that can happen when professors and alums reconnect.

“Our students go off and have their own successes in a variety of fields, and they often become our lifelong colleagues,” says Kramer.

“Students have all sorts of trajectories, and the way we interact with them, and the relationships that we create have all kinds of wonderful and unexpected futures.”