Oct 18, 2020
Online
Translating New Generations from Russian and Beyond
Translating New Generations from Russian and Beyond
It is vanishingly rare for writers under thirty-five to make it big in English translation, no matter their prominence in the original. How can translators enable young writers and the uniquely urgent questions they ask to travel further? How can new generations emerge collectively in an Anglophone field that rewards individual literary achievement?
The December 2020 issue of Words Without Borders approaches these questions through large-group curation: more than twenty people worked together to bring writers born since 1985 from Russian into English. This session begins with a mini-documentary about the project, from its inception at ALTA42 to brief readings of the results. Then, the floor will open for an audience-centered conversation on the global problem of introducing young writers into English.
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Moderator
Hilah Kohen translates post-Soviet literature and journalism. She worked for the Russian-language news outlet Meduza (meduza.io/en) and is now a Comparative Literature PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is studying the Kavkazi Jewish language Juhuri. Find her in LARB, Nashville Review, and soon in Words Without Borders.
Presenters
Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders and the coeditor with Ilya Kaminsky of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Josie von Zitzewitz is currently Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromso. She is a scholar and translator specializing in 20th-century Russian poetry. Recent translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Dreamcatcher, and the award-winning bilingual anthology 100 Poems about Moscow (OGI, 2017).