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, 2019Bulgaria | Bulgarian | Short Fiction
April, 2019"The Feather" is one my favourite of Vladimir Poleganov’s short stories, and a great example of his style, and the themes and symbols running through his work. I like how economical he is with exposition, or plot, or any characterisation in the classical sense, yet still able to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the fantastical world they are thrown into straight at the deep end. It is a confidently complex, erudite, and compelling piece without ever pandering, which is also an apt description of his writing in general.
I suspect the English translation turned out a little more full of pathos than Vladimir intended, as the original Bulgarian is comparatively sparser, even severe as a language, but I think it rather suits the rich, poetic imagery. I hope you enjoy reading "The Feather" as much as I enjoyed translating it!
- Peter Bachev
One day, a package appeared in my mailbox: brown paper-wrapped with a dozen mismatched stamps from a secondhand bookseller in Sweden. A surprise birthday gift.
With a little reverence and my heart making skippy hops, I opened it. Translated the epigraph, then immediately determined to translate the entire book. It seemed the poet was speaking directly to me and to my life--across oceans and decades, but there she was in my living room. Marie Lundquist and her 1992 debut collection I Walk Around Gathering Up My Garden for the Night.
Said poet Adam Zagajewski, “[Lundquist’s work has] the purity of the still-lifes of great masters . . . in them, we hear the world tremble.”
These taut, image-driven, aphoristic poems speak in a contemporary voice especially suited to the sound-byte era, and offer clarity and stillness in a frenetic world.
Lundquist has a cinematic eye, not surprising given her experience and interest in photography and dramaturgy. Some poems almost read as stage directions without dialogue. The poems regularly surprise, in quick turns of thought and image: one might suddenly stumble across Judas, a Greek frieze, firefighters, or an old-time circus troupe.
While the emotional terrain explored is intense, devastating even, Lundquist’s tone remains arms-length. The voice is calm but never seeks to comfort. She can be ironic but not cynical. Much of her work carries an erotic charge. Brilliantly, she appropriates scientific or pseudo-scientific language; with the stance of an anthropologist, she makes our own culture seem strange.
Her poems carry a sense of authority and urgency. The logic is sophisticated and clear, not a word wasted or poorly chosen. Each poem quietly accretes in a deep place and the reader ends the book feeling transported, a bit stunned even.
Though her voice is distinctly her own, at times I felt a kinship with Sexton and Szymborska. Or heard echoes of other Swedish poets: Tomas Tranströmer, Edith Södergran, Sonja Åkesson. Then there were moments when I could feel Lydia Davis and Herta Müller.
Strong praise attended the publication of this collection. The reviews frequently commented on her use of language, calling it “inventive,” “skilled,” “a sharp needle,” and “as clear as a running brook, characterized by sensualism and an elegant melancholy.”
Reviews noted the frequent shifts from the everyday world to the surreal and mythological. They lauded her treatment of such fraught topics as longing and shame, ambiguity around gender roles, the pull of memory and the problems of adult love. Her unique style was highlighted as well as her well-drawn and distinct imagery. Reviewers called the book “amazing,” and “fantastic.” Said Marianne Steinsaphir, “[Her] poems open up every time I read them, words that show the [possibilities] of language.” Said Eva Ottosson, “Her poetry… in short, is the kind you’d gladly get lost in.”
- Kristina Andersson Bicher
Philippe Delerm’s writings have been referred to as récits, snapshots, and essays. Sixty-one brief essays—ranging from one to three pages each—comprise the 178-page Le trottoir au soleil ("Sidewalk in the Sun"). A book of essays may or may not contain a narrative arc, but Delerm’s has a definite beginning and end, and the scenes, reflections, and narratives throughout certainly transport the reader from one point to the next. Essays may be read and appreciated in any order, however.
In Le trottoir au soleil, Delerm is an observer who conveys multisensory scenes that become snapshots of thoughts, of a time of life—from childhood to grandfatherhood. Scenes—each essay could be called such—range from a man standing at a kitchen sink doing dishes and listening to the radio, to the same man observing provocative teenagers in a city park, to remembrances of childhood vacations in contrast to grandparents’ outings. Delerm takes a signature approach as he both demonstrates and advocates being a watcher.
In a conversation with publisher Gallimard printed in the liner notes of a CD of recordings of the essays, Delerm is asked about the fact that in these essays he puts himself in the role of observer, more than participant, and furthermore seems a bit withdrawn from life. Having recently turned sixty, Delerm responds that he feels increasingly transparent. Yet he cherishes this transparent onlooker role, which does indeed permeate the collection. His is not a passive gaze, however, but a penetrating curiosity about, reflection on, and celebration of living. The essays are in turn humorous, poignant, provocative.
- Ellen Sprague
Cuba | Poetry | Spanish | United States
April, 2019“Poetry saved me from madness,” Jorge Olivera Castillo once said to describe his time in Guantánamo Prison. Between 2016 and 2018, the poet escaped what remained of his 18-year sentence by living in the United States, first as a writer for the Harvard University Scholars at Risk Program (where I met him) and second as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University. The poems featured here were written during the writer’s time in the United States, before he returned to Cuba at the risk of being incarcerated once again.
The primary tensions I see in Olivera’s poems lie between experiences of confinement and imaginaries of travel, evocative of the challenges of migratory communities (past and present), of Olivera’s own physically and psychologically traumatizing time in prison, and of his 1981 journey in a cargo ship to fight in the Angolan Civil War. The sincerity of Olivera’s poetry is reminiscent of Cuban journalist-poet José Martí’s Versos sencillos (1897), but also, more recently, of the works of exiled writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991). Even as they underline confinement, the poems reflect the motifs of transport, both under the auspices of continued captivity (to political regimes, nightmares, desire) and the hope for freedom.
While the difficulty of translating these poems sometimes sprang from their harrowing content and remarkable tonal candor, I took refuge in the poems' structures. Olivera’s lines are often jagged, some extending over the page and then followed by brief two- or three-word lines that appear to retreat into quieted, controlled thought, before extending again into rumination. The use of white space and the poems’ brevity speak equally to an aesthetic of erratically controlled speech marked with the quick imposition of silence. As with the queer Cuban poets Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima, the Afro-descendant poet’s works are reflective of concerns that Caribbean poets elsewhere share: the bounds between sea and land, land and body, dream and reality, and the myth of home faced with the reality of exile. In illuminating these bounds in “Endangered,” for instance, the poet’s voices leap between anthropomorphized depictions of the sun to “heaps of sand” embedded in a landscape of “hardened faces.” Indeed, it seems in Olivera’s poems that imaginaries of landscape are often more alive and animated than the bodies that navigate their place within it.
Written from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, these poems are part and parcel of the ongoing work Olivera has taken up to share his memory of imprisonment and aspirations for uncensored speech and literary discourse in and about Cuba. When I served as an interpreter for Jorge Olivera—at a talk he gave at Harvard University—he shared these objectives with his audience while stating that one of the main poets that provided him sustenance in solitary confinement was a woman from Massachusetts who passed much of her life in solitude: Emily Dickinson.
As Jorge Olivera Castillo has just recently returned to Cuba, he seeks further opportunities to share his voice in English while building literary and political conversations on and beyond the island.
- David Francis
Japan | Japanese | Travel Essay
April, 2019Toriko Wakasugi was a renowned journalist and fiction writer who wrote extensively on traveling alone in Japan as a woman. Though not directly mentioned, this account of her stay at active volcano Mount Asama was primarily to recuperate from ailing health caused by her imprisonment in Tokyo the year before for violating the security maintenance law (which sought to stamp out socialism, labor movements and unions, communism, anarchism, and essentially liberalism) by attending the wake of a socialist contemporary. By publishing the piece in the popular national newspaper Miyako Shimbun in late July of 1934, she managed to share via subtext her post-detainment suffering and refusal to cease reporting on socialist issues such as rural poverty in spite of the oppressive political climate of the time.
- Marissa Skeels
After Marina Tsvetaeva emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922, she suffered from a sense of homelessness that left her desiring fulfilling relationships. As a romantic, Tsvetaeva felt the rift between reality and fantasy, body and spirit, thought and feeling. She felt an aversion to the physicality of the world, as this physicality was a barrier that prevented a direct connection to the essence of nature and those around her. Her feelings on love reflected this focus on spirit rather than body, as well as the desire for all-consuming love from one person to another rather than mutual love.
Living as a poet in exile, disconnected from her spiritual motherland and audience, Tsvetaeva often despaired in the 1930s that she had lost her creative abilities and was doomed to lose her lofty position as a poet. She relied on correspondences to establish a separate space for her to express intimacy and to escape the spiritual isolation she felt in her self-imposed exile from home. Her greatest inspiration throughout her life came from the intense, one-sided adoration she exhibits in her letters.
In 1936, Baron Anatoly von Steiger, a young Russian émigré, sent her a book of his poems from a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Switzerland. They had met briefly at one of her poetry readings but Tsvetaeva could not fully recall their meeting. However, as a young poet of noble descent, ill and lonely, Tsvetaeva immediately developed a maternal love for Steiger as she fabricated an ideal romantic image of him. In her first letter to him, excerpted below, Tsvetaeva assumes the maternal role and makes clear her desire for this “enclosing and embracing” love, this filial relationship with her young, ill poet. It is over the course of the following two months, after receiving Steiger’s initial correspondence, that she writes the cycle, Poems to an Orphan. Tsvetaeva recreates her former creative power by immersing herself in this constructed romance. She fills the space around the heroine with images of an imaginary lover, while dissolving herself into nature, embedding her own emotions into the natural world around her.
After this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote only a few more poems before her return to the Soviet Union and subsequent death. Given the significant role that correspondences, particularly with Boris Pasternak, played in inspiring Tsvetaeva’s poetry throughout her life in exile, this last relationship with Steiger was her final attempt to connect with what she felt was her former self.
- Tara M. Wheelwright
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