Jamey Gambrell

Jamey Gambrell (April 10, 1954 – February 15, 2020) was an American translator of Russian literature, and an expert in modern art. She was an editor with the Art in America magazine, and was a winner of the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Life Gambrell was born in Manhattan on April 10, 1954. Her mother, Helen Roddy, was a teacher, and her father, James Gambrell III, was a professor of law. She had two siblings, a sister and a brother.

Gambrell attended the Elisabeth Irwin High School. She received an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where her thesis was on Anna Akhmatova. She studied at the Sorbonne and obtained a master's degree from Columbia University in Russian studies.

In the early 1980s, Gambrell was offered the diaries of Marina Tsvetaeva by Alexander Sumerkin, Joseph Brodsky's literary secretary. Her translation of portions of it was appreciated by Susan Sontag, who arranged for their publication in the magazine Partisan Review.

Gambrell's first published translated book was of Tatyana Tolstaya's Sleepwalker in a Fog, which appeared in 1992. She translated other works by Tolstaya, as well as several books by Vladimir Sorokin. Her translation of Sorokin's Ice (2007) was lauded for its hard-boiled rendition of the novel's brutal cadences. Other critics have found her translations to be as elegant, playful and layered as the originals. In 2002, she published her complete translation of Marina Tsvetaeva's Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922. Barbara Herbich's film USSaRt documented the proceedings, for which Gambrell interviewed the participating artists.

Selected translations