The Pushkin Club invites you to a conversation with translators Alissa Valles and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who will discuss the extraordinary life and writings of Józef Czapski with Masha Karp.
Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk (Starobil'sk) in September 1939, the Polish painter was one of a very small handful of people to survive the Katyń Massacre in April 1940.
His Memories of Starobielsk recalls these doomed men with the vivid detail of a portrait artist, as Czapski describes their struggle to preserve dignity and hope in hopeless circumstances, and the additional essays on art, history and literature – on the fate of Chaim Soutine, on encounters with Anna Akhmatova, on Czapski's youth in revolutionary Petersburg, and essays on painting that he wrote on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s strategic base in Central Asia – all show his profound ties to Russian culture and his argument for defending what is best in it at a time when it was in a totalitarian stranglehold.
The Pushkin Club has held regular events devoted to Russian culture and society since its foundation in 1954.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the translator of Czapski's Inhuman Land. She is a British translator of Polish literature based in London. She is best known as the long-time translator of Olga Tokarczuk's works in English, including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The former co-chair of the Translators Association in the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, she is also a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme in the National Centre for Writing.
Alissa Valles is the editor and translator of Memories of Starobielsk (New York: NYRB, 2021). She is a poet and Slavic scholar. She has published several poetry collections, among them Orphan Fire (2008), Anastylosis (2014), and Hospitium (2019). Her translations from Polish include Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems and Collected Prose (Ecco), Ryszard Krynicki's Our Life Grows (NYRB Poets), Anna Bikont's The Crime and the Silence (FSG), Aleksander Wat's Diary without Vowels, and Firebird: Selected Poems of Zuzanna Ginczanka (forthcoming from NYRB). She teaches at Boston University.