Eugene Ostashevsky is a scholar, translator and award-winning Russian-American poet who writes in English while engaging his native Russian and other languages in a creative dialogue. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narrative handicaps, Ostashevsky's writing is an allegory of emigration, incomprehension, untranslatability, and the otherness of others. He will read from his latest language-mixing work, as well as from his poetry-novel The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB, 2016) and talk about what kinds of meanings can arise when multiple languages meet on the same page, in what ways they interfere with each other, and how cultures interact through multilingualism and code-switching.
Eugene Ostashevsky. Conversation on Translingualism in Russian and American Poetry
