Eugene Ostashevsky

Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968) grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His latest chapbook is The Feeling Sonnets (Clinic Publishing). His latest full-length book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB), discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, and was the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the Venice Biennale. His previous books include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP) and Iterature (UDP). As translator from Russian, he works primarily with OBERIU, the 1920s-1930s underground circle led by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. He has edited the first English-language collection of their writings, called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern). His collection of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB), with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich, won the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently preparing, with Daniel Mellis, an edition of Tango with Cows, a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, which is forthcoming from UDP in 2021. He also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golynko, As It Turned Out (UDP), and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).