Digital Poetry
Anglophone academia tends to neglect translation practice: while many translators are themselves scholars, translation remains underrated as an impact-generating research outcome. Meanwhile, internet publishing thrived in Russophone literary spaces in the 2010s. With no strong copyright culture, no small-press tradition and no stigma around online publication, new networks of poets emerged who were entirely independent of any gatekeeper. These poets curated their own audiences via social media, and they collaborated directly with their translators.
I designed my project GLORIOUS to investigate this phenomenon and simultaneously promote literary translation as a research activity. After winning sponsorship from UiT – The Artic University of Norway in Tromsø, I secured funding from the European Research Council under the Horizon2020 initiative.
Covid made in-person fieldwork impossible, and I had to abandon my plans to explore festivals and gatherings where contemporary poets and their fans meet. Instead, I directed my focus towards online publication platforms and their power to shape literary outputs – from a theoretical angle, and in the context of the raging debate about feminist poetry in 2020.
The translation angle proved especially fruitful: with my co-editor, Hilah Kohen, I won a commission from acclaimed translation journal Words without Borders to produce a dedicated issue. After a year of intense work with a team of young writers and their translators, Young Russophonia was published, bringing together original texts, translations and writers’ voices in a single, globally accessible space.
Key Output
“Russophonia: New Writing in Russian”: special issue of translation journal Words without Borders (Feb 2021), ed. with an introduction by Josephine von Zitzewitz and Hilah Kohen. Original texts, translations, readings.
Media and Publications
Launch of “Young Russophonia” at Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, Feb 2021
Young Russophonia in London's Pushkin House: an evening of readings and discussion, Mar 2021
Publishing Poetry on Social Media: a conversation with poet Ksenia Zheludova about curating poetry audiences for Punctured Lines - Post-Soviet Literature in and outside the Former Soviet Union. Full video interview [in Russian]
Translating Living Russian Poets: Experiences of Collaboration: three contemporary poets and their translators reflect on their practice for Pushkin House, London
Young Russian Writers in Conversation: thematic video cluster for ALTA43, the virtual convention of the American Literary Translators Association
Scholarly Insights
“Case Study: Galina Rymbu, ‘Moia vagina’, June 2020”: on the most talked-about Russian internet poem of 2020, in Zeitschrift fuer Kulturkomparatistik, No 6: Poetics and Politics by Women in the Post-Soviet Space (2022)
Galina Rymbu's "Moia Vagina": guest lecture for the University of Trier's Lyrik in Transition project
“New Russian Literature and Online Journals”: on the importance of online platforms for poetry publishing, in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 89 (2022)
“Translating Russian Poetry into English in the Age of Social Media”: on the role of the translator and the distinctions between Russophone and Anglophone publishing, in Ähnlichkeit in Lyrik und Poetik der Gegenwart, ed. Nikolas Immer, Frank Kraushaar und Henrieke Stahl (Peter Lang, 2023)
The Scar We Know: review of leading feminist poet Lida Yusupova's translated collection for Words without Borders journal
Photo by Ksenia Zheludova