ALTA45 Bilingual Reading Series: Eastern Europe – Multigenre (May)

Margarit Ordukhanyan read Goar Markosyan-Kasper’s Penelope, translated from Russian. A stylistically experimental novel inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses and set in Yerevan in 1994, Penelope describes a day in the life of the titular protagonist, Penelope, as she searches for a place to take a hot shower. Margarit Ordukhanyan is an Armenian-born scholar and translator based in New York City. Her current translation projects include Penelope by Goar Markosyan-Kasper and To Keep Living by Narine Abgaryan, both Armenian-born women authors writing in Russian. Mary Jane White read “Life Train,” “An Emigrant and God Help Us,” “The Smoke,” poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian. This is from her final collection of lyric and longer poems, After Russia, published in Paris, in exile, in 1927. Mary Jane White is a poet and translator with National Endowment for the Arts Grants in both categories.

Katherine Young read poems from the volume Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine by Lyudmyla Khersonska, translated from Russian. I will read several translations originally commissioned for the volume Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press), one of which is also included in The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear by Boris and Lyudmyla Khersonska, edited by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky, just published (April 2022) by Lost Horse Press. Lyudmyla Khersonska, who taught American poet Ilya Kaminsky English as a child, has been writing about the war in Ukraine since at least 2014. Translations of her work have appeared widely in English, including a translation by Valzhyna Mort that recently appeared in The New Yorker. Katherine E. Young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards. Young’s translations of contemporary Russophone poetry have won international awards; she was named a 2017 NEA translation fellow. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia. Ena Selimović read “Night Shifts,” an excerpt from the novel Vanilla Ice Cream by Djurdja Knežević, translated from Croatian. Vanilla Ice Cream tells a deeply urban story set during a dead-of-night metro ride in a largely unspecified Western European location (later subtly revealed to be Berlin). Yet the setting is less important than the dynamic between the characters. Told through a third-person omniscient narrator, the novel is focalized around four distinct voices: a divorced father; a female healthcare worker who lives in isolation; and two women, Lidija and Maja, on the brink of a breakup. A climactic interaction that implicates all of the passengers leaves them equally but differently speechless. Ena Selimović is a writer and translator who works from Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) into English. With Mirgul Kali and Sabrina Jaszi, she cofounded Turkoslavia, a translation collective. Currently, she is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at Yale University. Dominique Hoffman read an excerpt from the novel The Meaning of Cecil the Lion’s Death by Olena Stiazhkina, translated from Ukrainian. Olena Stiazhkina’s Cecil the Lion’s Death Had Meaning was published in Ukraine in 2021. Until 2014, Stiazhkina was a professor of history at Donetsk State University. She fled the war to Kiev in 2014. This novel gradually switches from Russian to Ukrainian language tracking Stiazhkina’s own linguistic transitions. The novel opens with the birth of four children in a maternity ward in eastern Ukraine on the same day in 1986. They are part of the first generation to grow up and attend school in a free and independent Ukraine. Stiazhkina’s writing style utilizes a variety of linguistic registers and frequent word play. Dominique Hoffman is a translator, researcher and teacher. She works with texts related to literature, art and cultural history. She holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures and translates from Ukrainian and Russian. Lauren Bonet Spencer read Helga Schubert’s On Getting Up: Tales of a Life, translated from German. Depicting stories from a life split between East and West Germany during the time of Russian occupation, Helga Schubert’s Vom Aufstehen is simultaneously a piece of fiction and non-fiction. Growing up during the aftermath of World War II under surveillance of the Russians in the East, Schubert narrates, in “I” form, speaking bluntly about the harshness of her mother, the warmth of her grandmother, and the grapples she had writing about a war from which she was not yet distant enough to have fully processed. Lauren Bonet Spencer is an Atlanta-raised, Madrid-based, emerging literary translator from German, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She studied German and Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and Linguistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.