Translators Ainsley Morse and Anna Halberstadt present their bilingual edition of Maria Galina’s poetry and diaries (Cicada Press, 2024) written in Odesa during the first six months of the Russia-Ukraine war.
"Maria Galina’s poems, completed on the brink of Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine, capture a particular moment of Russophone poetry. Readers are to face instances of poems written on the edge, capturing the moment before in extremis, pulsating with unease and disbelief, and therefore, or because of that, offering all kinds of unforeseen experiments, shifts, and transgressions." -- Ostap Kin
Maria Galina is a prose writer, poet, literary translator, and literary critic who incorporates strong elements of fantasy and myth into her writings. She is a marine biologist by education. Born in the Soviet Union in Kalinin (now known as Tver), Galina grew up in Soviet Ukraine and studied biology in Odesa. She also studied salmon in Bergen, Norway, in the early 1990s. She lived and worked in Moscow for decades, but as of February 2022 lives in Ukraine (Odesa). She made her debut as a published fiction writer in the late nineties, and her first poems appeared in national publications in 1993. Galina has gone on to publish several other novels, including Malaya Glusha (L’Organization), Mole-Crickets, and Autochthons. Galina has received prizes for her poetry, which has been translated into many languages. Communiqués is her first book of poetry in English translation. She is also a literary critic who worked for years in the literary criticism department of the prestigious “thick” literary journal Novyi mir.
Ainsley Morse teaches in East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Anna Halberstadt, born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania, is a NYC-based psychologist, poet and translator.