Poetry night | Discovery and translation of works by Mykola Bazhan
Date and time:
Tuesday 29 June, 2021
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
The bilingual Ukrainian-English collection Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020) brings together the most interesting experimental works by Mykola (Nik) Bazhan, one of the major Ukrainian poets of the 20th century. An ardent Modernist, Bazhan was known for his idiosyncratic style and unique vocabulary. After Stalinist rule forced the poet into the straightjacket of officially sanctioned Socialist Realism, his early texts were dismissed as both irrelevant and subversive. Many poems from Bazhan’s three remarkable early collections (1926, 1927, and 1929) remain unknown to readers, both in Ukraine and the West. The publication for the first time makes these outstanding works available.
More than 15 translators and writers joined forces for this massive project, presenting a diverse set of translation techniques and approaches to collaboratively tackle this challenging corpus.
Join us to hear from the team behind this monumental project. Halyna Babak will speak about Bazhan’s oeuvre; Lev Fridman and Oksana Rosenblum will describe the stages of the project as it grew from a two-person team and a single poem. The introduction will be followed by the readings from the volume in Ukrainian and English.
As part of the readings, and during our discussion we will also hear from other collaborators on the project: Amelia M. Glaser, Anzhelika Khyzhnia, Ostap Kin, Svetlana Lavochkina, Seán Monagle, Ainsley Morse, Bohdan Pechenyak, Roman Turovsky, Mykyta Tyshchenko. Find out more about our speakers on Eventbrite.
Speaker
Halyna Babak
Halyna Babak is a scholar and editor in chief of the Czech journal NaVychod. She received her PhD in Slavic literatures from Charles University, Prague (2020). Her research focuses on Ukrainian and Russian avant-garde literature and Ukrainian interwar literary theory.
Speaker
Lev Fridman
Lev Fridman is a Russian-born speech-language pathologist based in New York City. He writes and translates (from Russian to English) and facilitates translation projects and publications. His work has appeared in publications by Ugly Duckling Presse and the Odessa Review. Most recently, he has written on the literary legacy of Mykola Bazhan.
Speaker
Oksana Rosenblum
Oksana Rosenblum is an art historian and translator residing in New York City. She graduated from the University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (BA, 1998; MA, 2001) and The Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC (MA, 2005), specializing in Cultural Studies and History of Art. Her projects have included visual research for the museums of Jewish History in Warsaw and Moscow. Oksana’s poetry translations and book reviews appeared in Kalyna Review, National Translation Month, and Versopolis.
Moderator
Vitaly Chernetsky
Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on modern and contemporary cultures (literature, film, popular culture) of Russia, Ukraine, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, considered in broader comparative/cross-regional and interdisciplinary contexts. Chernetsky is the author of the book Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization, of five edited or co-edited volumes, and numerous articles and reviews. His published translations from Ukrainian and Russian into English include two novels and numerous shorter literary works, as well as scholarly articles and historical documents. He has served on multiple prize juries and expert review panels and is on the editorial and advisory boards of several journals. He is the editor of the Ukrainian Studies book series at Academic Studies Press.
