Litquake 2022 – Calico: New Selections in Translation
3:00 – 4:00 pm PT
The Drawing Room Annex | 780 Valencia Street | San Francisco, CA
Event admission is free. Registration is strongly recommended.
Celebrate what literature can be and what literature can do, with readings from an incredible range of work featured in two new editions of the Calico series. This Is Us Losing Count is a new bilingual edition of eight contemporary Russian poets and seven translators that demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past. Visible showcases six genre-defying works from around the world that raise questions about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write in “the age of the calligram.” Translators Elina Alter, Eric Fishman, Il’ia Karagulin, and poet Rodrigo Flores Sánchez share readings and talk with Sarah Coolidge, editor of the Calico series.
Part of Litquake’s Words Around the World series, sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation. This event is also sponsored in part by a grant from Grants for the Arts.
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 Visible
Brimming with enigmatic photographs, future memes, and mud drawings, Visible showcases six genre-defying works from around the world that raise questions about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write in
the “age of the calligram.” In a rewrite of René Magritte’s “Les mots et les images,” Verónica Gerber Bicecci (translated by Christina MacSweeney) considers “images that think” and the internet. Marie NDiaye’s “Step of a Feral Cat,” translated by Victoria Baena, follows an academic, inspired by a portrait of an entertainer, as she walks the slippery space between literary ambition and exploitation. Monika Sznajderman (translated by Scotia Gilroy) assembles a fractured family history through photographs of a time she can never possibly know: “the pre-Holocaust world.” Focusing on those whose stories have yet to be told—the black Cuban singer Maria Martinez, a Polish family murdered in World War II, workers at a noodle shop in Busan, and the tallest man in recorded history—Visible asks us to interrogate the thin traces of shifting meaning we find in and between words and images, and how we can change that meaning for the future.
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.
Eric Fishman is an educator, writer, and translator. His most recent translation is Outside: Poetry and Prose by André du Bouchet (Bitter Oleander Press). He is currently translating a selected volume of poetry by Monchoachi. Eric is also a founding editor of Young Radish, a magazine of poetry and art by kids and teens. (Photo credit: Arlette Pacquit)
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.
Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Mexico City, 1977) is a poet interested in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary inquiry. He is the author of five poetry collections: Ventana cerrada (2020), Tianguis (2013), Zalagarda (2011), estimado cliente (2005 and 2007), and baterías (2006).
Sarah Coolidge received her BA in comparative literature from Bard College. She enjoys reading books in Spanish and English, and she writes essays on photography and international literature.