Translated Literature – Punctured Lines

Evgeny Shtorn, a writer, activist, and scholar, was born and raised in Soviet Kazakhstan and later lived, studied, and worked in St. Petersburg, Russia. His LGBTQ+ activism made him a target of Russia’s intensifying state-managed homophobia, and in 2018, Shtorn was forced to leave the country. A human rights organization helped him obtain a visa to Ireland, where he received refugee status. As a refugee, Shtorn entered the system of “direct provision” that funnels asylum seekers in Ireland through a series of dormitory-style housing centers. Deprived of the right to work, surviving on basic assistance, and repeatedly questioned and probed by government bureaucrats, Shtorn was forced to share his personal space with strangers, often with incompatible backgrounds.

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We are grateful to Herb Randall and Irina Mashinski for bringing us this interview about poetry, translation, music, and more. Both of them have appeared on Punctured Lines previously. An excerpt from Irina Mashinski’s hybrid poetry and prose collection The Naked World can be found here (while Herb Randall’s review of it in the Los Angeles Review of Books is he r e). At Punctured Lines, Herb Randall has contributed a personal essay about visiting Kharkiv and looking for traces of an English woman who moved there during Stalin’s reign and a review of Sana Krasikov’s The Patriots, about an American Jewish woman who also moves to Stalin’s Soviet Union (a clearly misguided endeavor from any country). We are very happy to have them back with the following in-depth discussion.