YOUR LANGUAGE MY EAR is a translation symposium that brings together Russian and American poets, along with American scholars, translators and students of Russian poetry, for intensive translation of contemporary poetry from Russian to English and vice versa at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Its innovative practice involves virtual collaboration on draft translations via a document cloud, involving multiple participants who each bring their own unique skills to bear—from bilingual scholars, students and translators, to poets who may speak only one language, and everything in between. After some months of this virtual labor, the physical gathering brings everyone together over a number of days to work in small groups to perfect these draft translations, and to present them in readings to the public. The first two rounds of the symposium (in 2011 and 2015) have resulted in multiple publications in books and poetry journals. This year, after a week-long workshop and public readings in Philadelphia and elsewhere, YLME comes to Hunter College and New York City!
POETS' BIOS:
Leonid Schwab was born in Bobruysk, Belarus in 1961. He graduated from Moscow State Technological University and has lived and worked in Orenburg and Vladimir. Since 1990 he has lived in Jerusalem. His work has been published in the journals Zerkalo, Solnechnoe spletenie, Dvoetochie, and in the anthology Vse srazu. He is the author of the poetry collections Poverit’ v botaniku (Believing in Botany, 2005) and Vash Nikolai (Your Nikolai, 2015). Schwab has been recognized with the Andrei Bely Prize (short-listed in 2004, laureate in 2016).
Galina Rymbu is a poetess, literary critic, curatrix, and philosopher from Lviv, Ukraine. Born in 1990 in Omsk, Siberia, Rymbu graduated from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow and received a Masters in socio-political philosophy from the European University at Saint Petersburg. She is the co-foundress and curatrix of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Poetry Prize for young Russian-language poets. She teaches at the St. Petersburg School of New Film and has organized seminars dedicated to feminist literature and the theory of “F-writing.” She is on the editorial board of the poetry series Novye stikhi (Poriadok Slov Publishing House). Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and Latvian, and has been published in the journals Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, Translit, Snob, n+1, Arc Poetry, The White Review, Berlin Quarterly, Music&Literature, Asymptote, and Powder Keg among others. She has published five books of poetry, including one in English translation. She was the 2017 poet laureate of the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga, and participates in festivals, conferences, and seminars all over Europe.
Elena Mikhailik was born in Odessa in 1970. She graduated from Odessa State University, where she studied literature. In 1993 she emigrated to Australia and since that time resides in Sydney. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales with a dissertation on “Varlam Shalamov: The Poetics of the ‘New Prose.’” She teaches translation at the University of New South Wales as well as at Macquarie University. She is the author of one collection of poetry, Ni snom ni oblakom (Not by dream or cloud, 2008), and her poems have been published in Vozdukh, Volga, Deti Ra, Arion, and other journals. Her scholarly monograph, Nezakonchennaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: opyt medlennogo chteniia (Incomplete Comet: Varlam Shalamov, an Exercise in Close Reading), on the poetics and rhetoric of the Kolyma Stories, was recently published in Moscow.
Dmitry Kuzmin is a poet, translator, editor and organizer of literary projects. He was born in Moscow in 1968. He has taught at various Russian educational institutions, and in 2014 was visiting professor of Russian poetry at Princeton University. Kuzmin co-authored the first Russian textbook of poetry. He is the founder of the publishing house Argo-Risk (1993), the site Vavilon (1997), and the journal Vozdukh. He has been editor of a number of anthologies, including one of contemporary Russian LGBT poetry. He headed the first almanac of Russian haiku, Triton, and the first journal of LGBT literature in Russia, RISK, and also created the online directory New Map of Literary Russia and the gallery Faces of Russian Literature. He was honored for his organizational work in 2002 with the Andrei Bely Prize. His 2008 collection of poetry and translations was recognized with the Moskovskii schet prize for best debut book of the year. His own poetry has been translated into fourteen languages. Kuzmin has translated into Russian Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Southern Mail, the works of the American poets e.e. cummings, Auden, Charles Reznikoff, C. K. Williams, as well as the works of Ukrainian, French, Belarusian, German, and Polish poets. Due to his opposition to the Russian political regime he has lived since 2014 in Latvia, where he has founded the Literature Without Borders project—an international poetry foundation and residency for translators of poetry. Since 2017, the project has been funding the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga.
TRANSLATORS' BIOS:
Kevin M.F. Platt, the organizer of Your Language My Ear, is a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Amherst College (1989) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1994) and taught at Pomona College before joining the UPenn faculty in 2002. He has been the recipient of grants from IREX, NCEEER, Fulbright-Hays and other programs, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12. Dr. Platt works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian cultures. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006), and Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin UP, 2018). He has also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation, most recently Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and Orbita: The Project (Arc, 2018), which is forthcoming this fall. His current projects include a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and a critical historiography of Russia.
Matvei Yankelevich‘s books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists), andBoris by the Sea (Octopus). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms(Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Anastasiya Osipova is a scholar, writer, and translator. She is an editor of Cicada Press, a NYC-based imprint that pursues contemporary politically engaged poetic texts. (Cicada’s most recent publication is a bilingual edition of Pavel Arseniev’s poetry entitled Reported Speech). She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU and is currently teaching at Gallatin, the School of Individualized Study.