Please join us for the closing event of Pushkin House’s First Contemporary Russian Poetry in Translation Residency with Galina Rymbu and Helena Kernan. Translator Kernan and poet Rymbu will perform readings of the originals and translations of Rymbu’s work that they have been working on together over the previous three weeks on a residency arranged collaboratively with Queen’s College, St Edmund’s Hall, and University College Oxford. They will also talk about the experience of being on the Residency together. The aim of the Residency is to support the translation of contemporary Russian poetry by providing a supportive environment where the translator and poet can work together over a dedicated time.
The Pushkin House Contemporary Russian Poetry in Translation Residency offers a translator and a living Russian language poet an opportunity to meet and work together over three weeks. We received over 30 extremely high-quality applications for the residency, submitted from translators all over the world, working with Russian language poetry. It was a difficult choice for our jury – Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale, Dmitry Kuzmin and Josephine von Zitzewitz.
This event will be in English and Russian.
In her application Helena Kernan wrote of Galina Rymbu’s work:
‘I first heard Galina recite her work at a queer poetry event as part of Kyiv Poetry Week in Spring 2018 and was instantly bewitched. Her poems are full of startling images, both brutal and magical, and arresting rhythms that betray a deep love of language and a belief in the power of words. Listening to her read felt like accessing some deep, hidden part of the human psyche, where our latent fears, complexes, joys and existential questions are contained. I was struck by the rich soundscape of her work, the ingenious way in which she weaves together unprecedented combinations of phonemes and internal rhymes, and her visceral understanding of what it means to be a thinking person living in the present day. I knew immediately that I wanted to begin a collaborative process of translation with her and, luckily, she agreed. I am convinced that such an innovative use of language and fresh perspective on the world deserve to be made available to an English-speaking audience and appreciated beyond the borders of her native Russia.’
Read more about the residency here https://www.pushkinhouse.org/residency
Helena Kernan graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2016 with a First Class BA in Russian and French language and literature. Since then, she has lived in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kyiv, where she has worked with a documentary theatre collective, the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Helena translates contemporary poetry from Russian into English and has spent time in Perm collaborating with the Russian human rights organisation Memorial to produce an exhibition dedicated to victims of Stalinist repression and record testimonies. She is the English-language editor of the online historical memory platform Imprisoned Youth, which is supported by the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. Her translation of ‘Only You, Chechnya’ by Elena Kostyleva was published in the journal Modern Poetry in Translation in 2017. She is currently a graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, where she is working on contemporary poetry, post-socialist memory and performance art in the Russian-speaking world.
Galina Rymbu is a poet, literary critic, translator, journalist, curator, philosopher and feminist. Born in Omsk, Russia in 1990, she now lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and also studied at the European University in St Petersburg. She edits an online journal dedicated to feminist literary theory ‘F-Pismo.’ She is interested in poetry as a form of public speech and thought. Galina is also a researcher at the Free Russia Foundation. She curated a special project ‘It is becoming visible’, dedicated to gender and domestic violence, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in Russia. Her poems have been translated into English, german, French, dutch, Italian, greek, Ukrainian, Spanish, Latvian, Romanian, Swedish and polish and she has been published in journals including ‘The New literary Review’ (Russia) Воздух (Russia), Translit (Russia), N+1,Arc Poetry, The White Review, Berlin Quarterly, Music&Literature, Punctum, Helikopter, Círculode poesía, Asymptote, Powder Keg and others. Publications of her poetry collections include ‘Передвижное пространство переворота’ (Арго-риск, 2014), WhiteBread (NY, After Hours LTD, 2016), ‘Времяземли’ (Харьков,изд-воkntxt, 2018), ‘Жизньвпространстве’ (Москва, изд-во «Новоелитературноеобозрение», 2018), Kosmiskais prospekts (Латвия, Ozolnieki: Literature Without Borders, 2018), Tijd van de aarde (Амстердам, UitgeverijPerdu, 2019). Rymbu also translates poetry from Ukrainian into Russian.