Jamey Gambrell Dies at 65; Made Russian Writing Sing, in English

A pre-eminent translator of contemporary Russian authors like Tatyana Tolstaya and Vladimir Sorokin, she won a prestigious prize for translation in 2016. Jamey Gambrell, an award-winning translator who conveyed the intricacies of work by contemporary Russian authors like Tatyana Tolstaya and Vladimir Sorokin to English-language readers, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. She was 65.

Her mother, Helen Gambrell, said the cause was cancer, which had only recently been diagnosed. Ms. Gambrell, a native New Yorker, steeped herself in Russian culture and literature, spending time in Moscow in the 1980s and ’90s and becoming involved in its art scene as artists there who had once been underground rose to international prominence. She was a critic, writer and editor for Art in America magazine for about 15 years, covering the careers of artists like Alexander Melamid, Vitaly Komar and Ilya Kabakov, and providing insights into modern art, made near the end of the Soviet era, that was unfamiliar to many in the West.

Ms. Gambrell told the critic Liesl Schillinger in an interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016 that translation felt like a natural extension of her work as a writer and editor, calling it “the most intimate and intensive form of reading there is. ” “You almost get to the point where you see things or make connections that the author isn’t even aware of,” she said. Ms.

Gambrell’s process often involved translating a quick draft, then revising it 10 or more times until she captured the nuances of the text. The first book she translated was “Sleepwalker in a Fog” (1992), a short-story collection by Ms. Tolstaya, a great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy; her stories have been compared to Chekhov’s. Ms.

Tolstaya’s sentences could be complex. One of them, as translated by Ms. Gambrell, read: “Over the exit, rising like a plague cemetery up in arms, the black skulls of electric meters huddled together; as night fell the white stripes of their teeth, each row marked by a single bloody tooth, began madly spinning to the right. ” Ms.

Gambrell went on to translate Ms. Tolstaya’s post-apocalyptic satire “The Slynx” (2003) and her nonfiction essays and reviews collected in “Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians” (2003). She also translated several notable books by Mr.