Catherine Ciepiela

Polina Barskova

Living Pictures

Six of the most remarkable contemporary Russian poets present their groundbreaking verse in a bilingual poetry collection published in partnership with PEN America's Writers in Dialogue project. In 2020, as international travel skidded to a halt, PEN America's Writers in Dialogue project--which opens the exhilarating world of contemporary Russian poetry to American readers by bridging the American and Russian literary communities--went remote, using online connection to foster collaborations between daring emerging or undertranslated poetic voices and dexterous translators. In this remarkable volume, the Russian poets and American translators who were paired for this initiative present their collaborative work in a bilingual format, along with conversations about the pleasures, challenges, and intimacies of translation. English-reading audiences will have an opportunity to experience the boldness and range, stylistic and thematic, of Russia's vital poetry scene. Featuring Ainsley Morse, Maria Galina, Catherine Ciepiela, Aleksandra Tsibulia, Anna Halberstadt, Oksana Vasyakina, Elina Alter, Ivan Sokolov, Kevin M.F. Platt, Ekaterina Simonova, Valeriya Yermishova, and Nikita Sungatov.

Russian Poetry Today

Verses on the Vanguard

Opulent, playful and sensual, Polina Barskova's poems have earned her a reputation as the finest Russian poet under the age of 40. While steeped in Russian and classical culture, Barskova's work remains unmistakably contemporary, at once classic and edgy - always fresh, new and startling. This is the first English translation of this remarkable poet, collecting poems from seven earlier books as well as from her recent work. Dralyuk and Stromberg's superb translation perfectly renders the strange and intoxicating beauty of Barskova's poetry.

Selected Poems

The Zoo in Winter

Six of the most remarkable contemporary Russian poets present their groundbreaking verse in a bilingual poetry collection published in partnership with PEN America’s Writers in Dialogue project. In 2020, as international travel skidded to a halt, PEN America’s Writers in Dialogue project—which opens the exhilarating world of contemporary Russian poetry to American readers by bridging the American and Russian literary communities—went remote, using online connection to foster collaborations between daring emerging or undertranslated poetic voices and dexterous translators. In this remarkable volume, the Russian poets and American translators who were paired for this initiative present their collaborative work in a bilingual format, along with conversations about the pleasures, challenges, and intimacies of translation. English-reading audiences will have an opportunity to experience the boldness and range, stylistic and thematic, of Russia’s vital poetry scene. Featuring Ainsley Morse, Maria Galina, Catherine Ciepiela, Aleksandra Tsibulia, Anna Halberstadt, Oksana Vasyakina, Elina Alter, Ivan Sokolov, Kevin M.F. Platt, Ekaterina Simonova, Valeriya Yermishova, and Nikita Sungatov.

An innovative, kaleidoscopic literary work about the siege of Leningrad and its aftermath by one of Russia's most acclaimed contemporary writers ‘A precise, tremendous and beautiful book’ Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory Growing up in Leningrad, Polina Barskova saw no trace of the estimated million people who died in the city during the Nazi blockade of 1941-44. As one of Russia's most admired and controversial contemporary writers, she has repeatedly returned to the archive of texts still being recovered from the siege, finding creative ways to commemorate these ghosts from her home city's past. A chorus of their voices and stories appears in Living Pictures, a breathtakingly inventive literary collage of memoir, archival material and fiction. With blazing immediacy and wit, Barskova delves into traumas historical and personal, writing of memories from a Soviet childhood, her foundational relationships and losses, and a life spent excavating vital fragments from under Leningrad's official history. Ending with a stunning chamber drama about two real people who died while sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege, this is a rich, polyphonic work of living history.

Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster

Besieged Leningrad

"Lavishly mordant, magically bitter, erotically sardonic, the poems of This Lamentable City plant themselves on the far side of history's hopelessness, where sometimes even a trace of love springs. Ilya Kaminsky's free translations are a live-wire joy to read."---Alicia Ostriker "Polina Barskova's work emerges from an intelligence and a sensibility in which poetry matters, and not only to poets. These poems arise from a confluence of history and lyric:...fraught with danger but vibrant with inquiry. Ilya Kaminsky and his collaborators have created taut, lively translations that earn their place as poems in English."---Marilyn Hacker "Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images...with a deep sense of history and culture...In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and...(w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address."---Ilya Kaminsky, From His Introduction to this Lamentable City "Barskova's poetry harbors that rarest of combinations: at once edgy, ironic, obviously modern...and classic, genuflecting to absolutely traditional Russian poetic mores and obsessions. The images are new, fresh, and even startling, but the rhythmic and sonic patterns have a reassuring aesthetic wisdom. I was utterly taken with these poems."---Dr. Ivonne H. Howell, Russian and International Studies, University of Richmond In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad---now called St. Petersburg, as before - she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her six books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. This is the first book of her poems to be published in English translation. Editor and translator Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and is author of a bestselling book of poems, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004), and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins, 2010). He teaches at San Diego State University and the New England College MFA Program in Poetry.

Poems of Polina Barskova

This Lamentable City

During the 872 days of the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), the city's inhabitants were surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany. They suffered famine, cold, and darkness, and a million people lost their lives, making the siege one of the most destructive in history. Confinement in the besieged city was a traumatic experience. Unlike the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, who were brought from afar and robbed of their cultural roots, the victims of the Siege of Leningrad were trapped in the city as it underwent a slow, horrific transformation. They lost everything except their physical location, which was layered with historical, cultural, and personal memory. In Besieged Leningrad, Polina Barskova examines how the city's inhabitants adjusted to their new urban reality, focusing on the emergence of new spatial perceptions that fostered the production of diverse textual and visual representations. The myriad texts that emerged during the siege were varied and exciting, engendered by sometimes sharply conflicting ideological urges and aesthetic sensibilities. In this first study of the cultural and literary representations of spatiality in besieged Leningrad, Barskova examines a wide range of authors with competing views of their difficult relationship with the city, filling a gap in Western knowledge of the culture of the siege. It will appeal to Russian studies specialists as well as those interested in war testimonies and the representation of trauma.

Polina Barskova

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