POSTPONED:This Is Us Losing Count
Virtual Event
This event is postponed.
Two Lines Press joins Pittsburgh’s White Whale Bookstore to celebrate the fifth installment of the Calico series, This Is Us Losing Count, a bilingual edition of eight contemporary Russian poets and seven translators that demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past.
Contributors Elina Alter, Il’ia Karagulin, and Eugene Ostashevsky join writer Alina Stefanescu to discuss their translations of Alla Gorbunova, Oksana Vasyakina, Ekaterina Simonova, and Galina Rymbu.
About This Is Us Losing Count
In This Is Us Losing Count, eight contemporary Russian poets obliterate old conventions in their efforts to reckon with the past. Here memories take the form of housewares, specters, city streets, and even foods that can weigh down, haunt, disorient, and bloat but never quite sate us. Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter) surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise have been lost to time. Ekaterina Simonova (translated by Il’ia Karagulin) dwells in her dying grandmother’s hallucinatory final days, spent convening with deceased friends and relatives, visible only to her. And Galina Rymbu (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky) assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” In sinuous translations of verse both irreverent and sentimental, this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series asks to what extent we must remember in order to reinvent.
About the Calico Series
The Calico Series, published biannually by Two Lines Press, captures vanguard works of translated literature in stylish, collectible editions. Each Calico is a vibrant snapshot that explores one aspect of our present moment, offering the voices of previously inaccessible, highly innovative writers from around the world today.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult) are forthcoming. She is the editor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.
Il’ia Karagulin is a poet, translator, copy editor, and doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where they research queerness, transness, and disability in twentieth-century Russian literature and poetry. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they now live in New Haven, Connecticut.
Eugene Ostashevsky’s most recent translation project was F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, an anthology he coedited with Ainsley Morse and Galina Rymbu.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature.