About the Translator
Born in Vienna, Austria in 1924, Elisabeth Jezierski had a multilingual upbringing. She spent her childhood in Austria and Germany and moved with her family to Argentina in 1938. She came to the United States in 1947 and since 1958 has made her home in Durham, North Carolina. In 1949 she graduated from Bryn Mawr with a Bachelor’s Degree (magna cum laude) in Politics and Russian history. In 1952 she earned a Master’s Degree in Slavic Literatures and Languages at Harvard and from 1965 to 1969 was enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She was a member of the International Studies Group of the Brookings Institution from 1949 to 1951. She began her long and on-going career in tutoring as a teenager in Buenos Aires, was a tutor for the Harvard Bureau of Study Counsel from 1954 to 1958, an interpreter for the American Dance Festival, the Sister Cities Program and the North Carolina International Visitors’ Center. From 1952 to 1989 she held appointments at the Cambridge School of Weston, Duke University, North Carolina Central and North Carolina State University, teaching French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Russian literature in English translation. She taught English at the Pedagogical Institute of Durham’s Sister City Kostroma in Russia. She was the recipient of two grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board at Moscow State University in 1975 and 1980, two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Ohio State University in 1976 and the University of Minnesota in 1983, a Fulbright grant at the University of Rome in 1981 and an award from the Folger Institute at the Library of Congress in 1986.
She has been involved in many editorial and translation projects. Her translation of the short story “Going after Goat Antelopes” by Svetlana Vasilenko, appears in Lives in Transit: A Collection of Recent Russian Women’s writing, edited by Helena Goscilo (Ardis, Dana Point, CA, 1995). She was the consultant for the visual translation of Mayakovsky/El Lissitsky: For the Voice by Martha Scotford (The British Library, 2000) and the translator of numerous passages quoted in the monograph Nikolai Karamzin: from Nature to History - An Interpretation by Vladimir Bilenkin to be published by the Edwin Mellen Press. The Appendix to this work contains the first English translation of Karamzin’s fictional correspondence between the friends Melodor and Fialet—a seminal work of 18th century Russian literature and thought.
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