Join n+1 for a discussion between the poets Eugene Ostashevsky and Genya Turovskaya. They’ll be discussing ghost languages, host languages, translation, and Ostashevsky’s new collection The Feeling Sonnets. The event is free and open to the public.
Friday, February 3
7PM
n+1 office
37 Greenpoint Ave #316
Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets—his fourth collection of poems—is written in an English that is translingual not only in that it incorporates fragments of other languages, but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, phrases, and poetic conventions are defamiliarized to convey some of the effects of the experience of migration and non-nativeness.
As translators, Genya Turovskaya and Eugene Ostashevsky have collaborated on OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, as well as on editions of the contemporary Russian-language poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Alexander Skidan. Genya Turovskaya, born in Kyiv, is a Whiting Award winner and author of the poetry collection The Breathing Body of this Thought. Eugene Ostashevsky’s previous book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, dealt with the uneasy relations between pirates and parrots. His translation of Lucky Breaks by the Ukrainian fiction writer Yevgenia Belorusets was recently excerpted in n+1.