Interview with Emilia Shrayer
Emilia Shrayer, an English-Russian/Russian-English translator and interpreter, is a native of Moscow and a graduate of the Moscow Linguistic University. A former refusenik, she left the USSR and emigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy. The Shrayers arrived in Providence, RI, the home of Emilia and her husband, a writer David Shrayer-Petrov for the next twenty years. They currently reside in Brookline, MA.
In 2008, Emilia retired from the Rockefeller Library, Brown University, but she found herself back at work part-time as a medical interpreter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. As a literary translator, she has translated into English a number of works by David Shrayer-Petrov. Emilia contributed translations to Shrayer-Petrov’s collections Jonah and Sarah and Autumn in Yalta. Her translations into Russian, with David Shrayer-Petrov, include work by Erskine Coldwell and Australian poets.