Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl festival and will take place at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025 at 5 pm.
Continue reading “Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out”When: Monday, November 25, 2019 at 6:30 PM – 9 PM
Where: Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, California 94110
This reading gathers together translators, writers, and scholars whose writing is connected, in various ways, with the literatures of the former Soviet Union.
We’re grateful to the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies that’s hosting its annual conference in San Francisco this year, which has allowed us to put this reading together with participants from across the United States.
A participatory reading means that, in addition to the announced readers, we’ll have a first come first served sign-up sheet for people who want to speak up and introduce their projects. We ask that each participant limits their reading or presentation to five minutes.
We’re delighted to have:
Olga Breininger with her book There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union
Shelley Fairweather-Vega with A Life At Noon by Talasbek Asemkulov
Yelena Furman with her story “Naming” from Narrative Magazine
Wayne Goodman with an excerpt of his novel-in-progress Borimir: Serving the Tsars
James Kates with Aigerim Tazhi‘s poetry collection Paper-thin Skin
Maggie Levantovskaya with her essay “To Conjure Up the Dead” from Michigan Quarterly Review
Dmitri Manin with translations of Nikolay Zabolotsky‘s Stolbtsy
Masha Rumer with her book Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting
Sasha Vasilyuk, with her novel in progress about a Soviet prisoner of war
Mary Jane White with Marina Tsvetaeva translations
Olga Zilberbourg with stories from her collection Like Water and Other Stories
Josie von Zitzewitz introducing Russophone Literature by Young Writers
and more! Please reach out to puncturedlines [at] gmail.com if you want to be a part of this.
ALTA, American Literary Translators Association hosted a virtual reading with three translators who are completing their yearlong program as mentees of exprienced translators working in the field.
This recording offers a unique opportunity to get an early glimpse into stories that hopefully will eventually become books. Fiona Bell is working from Russian on translating Natalia Meshchaninova–a contemporary filmmaker who also published a book of autobiographical stories–in this excerpt, the narrator tells of her teenage experience of keeping a diary, the way she constructs her self on paper, based on examples from her reading more (in particular, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer — a novel that was spun off from the Twin Peaks series!).
Mirgul Kali, translating from Kazakh, reads an excerpt from Mukhtar Magauin’s novella Kokbalaq, that tells of a life of a traditional Kazakh musician in the Soviet Union, and from this excerpt we get to understand something of his relationship with his art. In the interview after the reading, Mirgul talks about learning from this book about her own culture and all the reading she needed to do to convey the musical terms into English. The more I learn about her project, the more impressed I am with the amount of scholarship and thought that has gone into this translation.
Jennifer Kellogg reads to us from Book of Excercises II by a modern Greek poet, Geogre Seferis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. This book was published postuhomsouly in 1976, and most of the poems in this volume have not been translated to English until now.
Please enjoy and if you feel inspired, donate to ALTA to support this fantastic fellowship program.
Punctured Lines 