Rita Rait-Kovaleva

[1] Rait-Kovaleva received the Order of Friendship of Peoples and the Thornton Wilder Prize from the Columbia University's Translation Center.

[2] Born into a Jewish family in the village of Petrushevo, Kherson Oblast, then in Russian Empire, Rait-Kovaleva graduated from the medical faculty of the Moscow University in 1924.

[2] She initially worked in medical institutions, but at the same time began a literary activity in 1920 by translating Mayakovski's Mystery-Bouffe into English.

[2] Rait-Kovaleva wrote: "One can really comprehend the language of Faulkner's protagonists only if one knows the pretentious Southern speech of scions of 'noble' families and the inconsistent (both simplified and intricate) speech of 'poor whites' and Negro farmhands and sharecroppers in which – side by side with the biblical lexicon and in the rhythm of the spirituals – one hears underworld slang with Anglo-Saxon four-letter words".

[1] According to Russian philosopher Boris Paramonov, Rait-Kovaleva captured the street slang of the novel's protagonist Holden Caulfield "without losing the sharpness and wit of the original version", although she had never been to the United States.