Four poets, writers, and translators read a combination of translated and original work, including Eugene Ostashevsky’s translations of Marianna Kiyanovsky, Timmy Straw’s translations of Grigori Dashevsky, Venya Gushchin’s translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence, and Elina Alter’s translation of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love.
Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator from Oregon. Their poems and translations appear in Annulet, Yale Review, Jacket2, the Paris Review and elsewhere, and their first book of poems is forthcoming on Fonograf Editions.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova's It's the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) was published in February 2023, and another collection is forthcoming. Her translation of Oksana Vasyakina's Wound (Catapult US, MacLehose UK) will be published in September. She is an Oral History Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and the editor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.
Venya Gushchin is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian Modernist poets. He is also a translator, who has worked primarily on Silver Age poetry (Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Blok among others). His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. His writing has appeared in Cardinal Points, The Birch, and elsewhere.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. His Feeling Sonnets, published in 2022 by Carcanet in the UK and NYRB Poets in the US, examine the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. As translator of Russian avantgarde literature, Ostashevsky is best known for his OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006) and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (with Matvei Yankelevich; NYRB Poets, 2013), which won the National Translation Award. His translations of contemporary Russophone writing include F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Ainsley Morse and Galina Rymbu; isolarii, 2020) and Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions, 2022).