The British Council in Moscow calls translators of poetry to submit their entries for a chance to take part in a Pre-Raphaelite Translation Seminar.

      The regular translation seminar organised by such outstanding poetry translators, as Grigory Kruzhkov, Marina Boroditskaya, and Sasha Dugdale, will result in a compilation of Russia's first-ever collection of poetic works of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and their contemporaries. The collection will then accompany a large scale exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite artists at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in 2013.

      The competition is a joint effort of the British Council in Moscow and the State Library of Foreign Literature. Submission date is September 7, 2012; the winners will be announced on September 15, and the seminar will take place between 24 and 30 of September 2012.

      Below is one of the poems to be translated from English into Russian, by Christina Georgina Rossetti: 

A Dream

      

      Once in a dream (for once I dreamed of you)

      We stood together in an open field;

      Above our heads two swift-winged pigeons wheeled,

      Sporting at ease and courting full in view.

      When loftier still a broadening darkness flew,

      Down-swooping, and a ravenous hawk revealed;

      Too weak to fight, too fond to fly, they yield;

      So farewell life and love and pleasures new.

      Then as their plumes fell fluttering to the ground,

      Their snow-white plumage flecked with crimson drops,

      I wept, and thought I turned towards you to weep:

      But you were gone; while rustling hedgerow tops

      Bent in a wind which bore to me a sound

      Of far-off piteous bleat of lambs and sheep.