Lydia Razran Stone

Bewildering Stories biography

to Bewildering Stories bibliography

Lydia Razran Stone is a first-generation American who makes her living as a technical translator from Russian and devotes a large portion of her spare time to translating poetry.

Her educational and professional experience has included a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and ten years working for NASA, tracking and writing about Soviet biomedical research relevant to space flight.

She is the editor of the SlavFile, the newsletter of the Slavic Language Division of the American Translators Association, for which she writes a humor and cultural column. While some of her translations of Russian classical and “Silver Age” poetry have been published, the bulk, including Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Yershov’s Little Hump-Backed Horse, are still only in samizdat circulation.

She is a translator of several plays for the Children’s Theater in Virginia. In 2000 Cornerstone Press in Chicago published a book of poems by Irina Ratushinksaya Wind of the Journey translated by L. R. Stone.

Lydia’s translations of Liana Alaverdova’s poetry were published in the Witness, Medicinal Purposes Literary Review magazines and some other periodicals in the U.S. as well as in Modern Poetry in Translation #20, Kings College, London, 2002. Dr. Stone lives in Alexandria, Virginia.