English | Essay | Ireland/United States
June, 2019To celebrate Pride Month and Stonewall 50, we’re dedicating the June issue of InTranslation to a folio of translated Russian LGBTQ+ literature entitled Life Stories, Death Sentences, co-edited by author Margarita Meklina and translator Anne O. Fisher.
In this first post, we're featuring Margarita Meklina's foreword to the folio. It's followed by posts containing four translators' English renderings of poetry and prose by eight authors writing in Russian, and an afterword by translator David Louden.
We hope you enjoy this important issue. If you live in the NYC area, please join us on Friday, June 14 for a special bilingual event at The Brooklyn Rail's Industry City headquarters, where we'll present recorded Russian readings by the folio authors and live English readings by the translators, along with commentary by noted scholars of Russian literature and gender/sexuality studies.
- Jen Zoble and Donald Breckenridge, InTranslation Co-Editors
Canada/Belize | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Lida Yusupova is the author of three books of poetry, Irasaliml (1995), Ritual C-4 (2013), and Dead Dad (2016), and co-author with Margarita Meklina of the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki, 2008). Dead Dad was awarded the Difference (Razlichie) poetry prize in 2017, honoring her “books in which poetry becomes an investigation. ... The jury took special note of the innovative and uncompromising language in her discussions of violence.” In 2016, she received an invitation to attend the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) conference, an honor offered annually to a single poet. Her work has been published in the journals Air (Vozdukh), Mitya’s Magazine (Mitin Zhurnal), St. Petersburg Review, Atlanta Review, and others. Her verse has been translated into English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Czech, and Polish. She has lived in Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem, and now resides in Toronto and on an island off the coast of Belize. Kirill Kobrin has said of Yusupova’s poems, “Their angle of observation and description is nearly impossible for Russian poetry.”
Friedrich Chernyshev (b. 1989) studied at the Donetsk Medical University in Ukraine and currently lives in Kiev. He is an LGBTQI activist and coordinates the transgender program for Insight, a Ukrainian LGBT community organization. His translations from German and Ukrainian have been appearing since 2013 in TextOnly, Air (Vozdukh), and elsewhere. His own poems were first published in the gender issue of ’Nother Man – ’Nother Woman (Yshsho Odin — Yshsho Odna) of Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can find his work on textonly.ru, litkarta.ru, and polutona.ru, and you can read (in Russian) about his coming out on upogau.org.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Ilya Danishevsky is a Russian author and publisher for the opposition. He graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and studied the history of religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is editor-in-chief of the Anhedonia book project (published by AST), dedicated to studying the institution of violence in contemporary Russia. Danishevsky is interested in those who describe reality in spite of official discourse. In 2014, he published his novel Tenderness for the Dead (Nezhnost’ k mertvym), and his book Mannelig in Chains (Mannelig v tsepyakh) came out in 2018.
Poet and artist Nastya Denisova (b. 1984, Leningrad) lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). Her writing has been published in many print and online journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image, and samples of her work can be viewed here: vimeo.com/nastyadenisova.
Scholar, editor, translator, and poet Dmitry Kuzmin (b. 1968) has translated poems from English, Ukrainian, and French into Russian, and his own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages. His scholarship includes the textbook Poetry (Poeziya) (co-author, 2016) and a book-length study of one-line poems (2016). His two poetry collections are It’s Fine to Be Alive (Khorosho byt zhivym, 2008) and Blankets Not Stipulated (Kovdri ne peredbacheny, Ukraine, 2018). Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989, and has been the head of poetry imprint ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993. He is also editor-in-chief of the Vavilon internet project (www.vavilon.ru) and of the poetry quarterly Vozdukh (Air). Kuzmin has compiled several anthologies, most recently an anthology of present-day Russian LGBT writing in Spanish translation (2014). He has been awarded the Andrey Bely prize (2002), and It’s Fine to be Alive won the Moscow Reckoning award for best debut poetry collection. In 2014, Kuzmin emigrated from Russia to Latvia for political reasons and started Literature Without Borders, which fosters translation projects and provides residencies for poets and translators: www.literaturewithoutborders.lv/about. Kuzmin holds a PhD from Samara State Pedagogical University.
Russia/United Kingdom | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Stanislav Lvovsky (b. 1972) was born in Moscow and has worked in advertising, cultural events management, and journalism. Lvovsky is the former editor-in-chief of the “Literature” section of OPENSPACE.RU/COLTA.RU and the winner of several Russian literary awards. He is the author of six published collections of poetry, one short story collection, and one novel (written in co-authorship with Linor Goralik). One of his poems was the basis of the project “Quiet War Songs” (2015) by six contemporary Russian composers. Lvovsky regularly publishes articles on political and social issues as well as on cultural history and contemporary Russian poetry in various periodicals and academic journals. His poetry has been translated into and published in English, French, Chinese, Italian, and other languages. Currently he is finishing his DPhil thesis on Soviet cultural history at the University of Oxford.
Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina) is a native Muscovite. She has published a prose collection, Freakipedia, or the Adventures of a Shard (Frikipedia, ili Pokhozhdenia oskolka, 2010), and three poetry collections: W (Zh, 2000), Voilà: A Genre Anthology (Voilà: Antologia zhanra, 2004), and A Cow Ate [the First Word] ([Pervoe slovo] syela korova, 2008). Zelenina is a historian and the author of From Judas’s Scepter to Fool’s Staff: Jews in the Medieval Spanish Court (Ot skipetra Iudy k zhezly shuta: prodvornye yevrei v srednevekovoy Ispanii, 2007), Judaism Two: Faces of the Renaissance (Iudaika dva: renessans v litsakh, 2015), and The Fiery Foe of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Surveillance of the Inquisition (Ognennyy vrag marranov: zhizn i smert pod nadzorom inkvizitsii, 2018). She was editor and translator at the Gesharim/Cultural Bridges (Mosty kultury/Gesharim) publishing house and editor-in-chief of the website Booknik. She has also taught at Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (RSUH). Currently, Zelenina is Associate Professor in RSUH’s Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies and a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation.
Ireland/United States | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Bilingual essayist and fiction writer Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her English-language articles and short stories have been featured in The Cardiff Review’s queer issue, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Words Without Borders, while her fiction in English translation has appeared in the Norton Flash Fiction International (2015), The Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toad Suck Review, and Eleven Eleven. Meklina has written six books in Russian (two of them in collaboration with Lida Yusupova and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko) and two in English, the YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote and a collection of short stories entitled A Sauce Stealer. Meklina’s awards include the Andrey Bely Prize (2003), the Yeltsin Center’s Russian Prize (2008), the Mark Aldanov Literary Prize (2018), and The Norton Girault Literary Prize’s Honorable Mention (2019).
English | Essay | United States
June, 2019The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).