[New York]

Poetry Reading: Polina Barskova
October 28, 2016, 4:00 pm
at Hunter West B126, Chanin Language Center, Hunter College

The Division of Russian and Slavic Studies at Hunter College will host a reading with Polina Barskova in Russian with English translations by Catherine Ciepiela. A discussion will follow the reading. For anyone not affiliated with CUNY please RSVP by sending an email to russhunter@hunter.cuny.edu A professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, POLINA BARSKOVA is the world's leading authority on the Siege of Leningrad and its representation in culture; as a poet, she explores the same topic from the perspective of her real-life characters, who populate her works and speak to us through their own words. Barskova has recently edited a bilingual anthology Written in the Dark. Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016). She is the author of the play Living Pictures (2015), which has been staged in Russia and is now being translated into English by Catherine Ciepiela. CATHERINE CIEPIELA is a literary translator and professor of Russian at Amherst College. She is the world expert on the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and Russian modernism. Apart from presenting her English translations of Barskova's poetry, Ciepiela will discuss the limits of translatability of Siege poetry from Russian into English - a language that has been spared from the kind of experience that had engraved itself onto the Russian culture in the twentieth century.