I want to tell you something small, in the great turning of this world, intimate as your grandmother’s soup. When you boil beets, carrots, and potatoes together, the potatoes will soften first, even if they are bigger than the other vegetables.
It is summer 2020, and my hands are Shakespearian (“out, damned spot!”)—beet stained. Our mid-century dining table is a stage set for “Salat Vinegret,” the Soviet-era culinary staple featuring ingredients that are readily available and inexpensive, even in wintertime. The supporting cast of bowls, knives, etc., isn’t from the old country, but is well practiced in recipes that travel back to my early childhood in L’viv, Ukraine.
Tag: contemporary women poets
Revealing Poetry from Within: An Interview with Alla Gorbunova, by Alexandra Tkacheva
Alla Gorbunova is a Russian poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published six books of poetry and four books of prose, and her work regularly appears in major literary journals, including Znamia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, TextOnly, and others. Gorbunova’s poems and prose have been translated into many languages. She has taken part in Russian and international festivals of poetry and prose, and in 2012 participated in poetry readings in New York and Chicago. English-language translations of her poems and prose have appeared in Poetry, Words Without Borders, Columbia Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, and Nashville Review.
The English translation of her book of prose It’s the End of the World, My Love by Elina Alter is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Press in 2022. Gorbunova is a laureate of Russia’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Andrei Bely Prize, the NOS Literary Prize, and the Debut Prize. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University.
Continue reading “Revealing Poetry from Within: An Interview with Alla Gorbunova, by Alexandra Tkacheva”Making People Feel Uneasy: Joanna Chen in Conversation with Katherine Young
Katherine Young, a poet and translator, gave this interview on BLARB, the blog of the esteemed Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2018, Academic Studies Press published Young’s translation of the trilogy, Farewell, Aylis, by Akram Aylisli, currently a political prisoner in his native Azerbaijan (Young has spearheaded efforts to free him, including a recent petition circulated on social media). Olga Zilberbourg reviewed this novel, which Punctured Lines noted in our post. As we also noted, an excerpt from his novella, A Fantastical Traffic Jam, translated by Young, can be found here.
Young’s latest project is the translation of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets (Slavica, forthcoming 2020), an open, unflinching account of her abortion that was controversial when it came out in Russia. As Young says, “Women don’t talk about these things, even with their partners, so to write a book in which you expose the most intimate details of your body and the choices you made medically is a violation of a lot of subtle taboos about women who are supposed to grin and bear their trials and tribulations.”
Young also talks about being a poet and how much Russian poetry has shaped her own: “I feel very much more informed by Russian poets than most American poets. I’ve read Walt Whitman, but I don’t identify with him the same way I might say Alexander Pushkin or Mikhail Lermontov or Anna Akhmatova.”
You can read the full interview here: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/making-people-feel-uneasy-joanna-chen-conversation-katherine-young/
Punctured Lines 