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 here). 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.