TURKOSLAVIA Issue 3 Launch
7:00 pm | Doors 6:00 pm
Et al. Gallery | 2831A Mission Street | San Francisco, CA 94110
Join us to celebrate the launch of issue 3 of TURKOSLAVIA, an online journal of literary translation from Turkic and Slavic languages(opens in a new tab). Editors Ena Selimović and Sabrina Jaszi and contributor Donohon Abdugafurova will read from their translations in the issue alongside projections of the graphic designs by Hanna Priemetzhofer that illustrate the issue.
The Turkoslavia Collective was founded by Sabrina Jaszi, Mirgul Kali, and Ena Selimović as a collective of translators working from Turkic and/or Slavic languages. Turkic and Slavic languages tend to be isolated into national categories. Moreover, these nations are often represented as warring factions bearing “ancient ethnic hatreds” against one another. Against this current, the collective—and the translation journal they publish—stages and celebrates their shared linguistic and cultural histories and formally acknowledges the overlapping empires that endure in these places.
TURKOSLAVIA launched in 2022 in collaboration with Exchanges journal at the University of Iowa. The poetry and prose published in Turkoslavia Journal stages the work of brilliant but often underrepresented authors writing in lesser-translated languages. They publish diverse work that challenges the nationalized borders through which we think about literature today, and thinks creatively about these languages’ many overlapping traits and histories.
The selections in this issue, translated from Altai, BCMS (Croatian), Uzbek, and five different Russians, are accompanied by graphic designs by Hanna Priemetzhofer, whose experimentation with text and typeface visualizes the issue’s myriad forms of multilingualism.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-American writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has received support from ALTA, ACLS, and NEA. Her translation of Nebojša Lujanović’s Cloud the Color of Skin was published in May 2024, and her translation of Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie is forthcoming in early 2025. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.
Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator based in Alameda, CA, working from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her published translations include the works of Salomat Vafo, Suhbat Aflatuni, O‘tkir Hoshimov, Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. Her co-translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press) received the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Best Translation Prize for 2023–24. She is also a writer with stories and essays published in StoryQuarterly, J Journal, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective and journal devoted to Turkic and Slavic literature in translation. To learn more, visit Turkoslavia.com.
Donohon Abdugafurova is a scholar of religion, gender, and literature within Uzbek society. Her work has appeared in Central Asian Affairs, Journal of Georgetown Gender and Law, and Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and works at Wake Forest University.