Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative and Russian/Eurasian Studies Program Present

Words Forever Young: Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Translation

Sponsored by the Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative and Russian and Eurasian Studies, this panel explores the joys and challenges of translating Russian Avant-Garde and late Modernist poetry to English. Maria Khotimsky of MIT and Ainsley Morse of Dartmouth College address the question of translatability of Hylea and Cubo-Futurist poetry, with examples from Guro, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, and discuss the complexities of contemporary readers' perception and interpretation of late Mandelstam's poetry in translation.

Maria Khotimsky is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Russian Language Coordinator in the Department of Global Studies and Languages at MIT. Her recent work includes articles and conference talks on the ideology of translation in the Soviet Union, and poetics of translation in the works of several leading twentieth-century Russian poets, as well as in the work of Russian-American translingual poets. She is a co-editor of a volume of scholarly essays on the poetry and philosophy of Olga Sedakova, published in Russia (Ol’ga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia, NLO, 2017), and in the US (The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova. Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Dartmouth College Russian department and translates Russian and former Yugoslav poetry and prose. Recent publications include Permanent Evolution, a collection of theoretical essays by the Formalist critic Yuri Tynianov (ASP; edited and translated with Philip Redko), Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Soviet pastoral" Beyond Tula (ASP), and, with Bela Shayevich, Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin (UDP) and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (UDP 2013). She is currently translating the late avant-garde novelist and poet Konstantin Vaginov and contributing to an anthology of contemporary feminist poetry. 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium

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