The Feeling Sonnets: Language Play, Translingualism, Situatedness

What history does an immigrant have? How do immigrant images of “their own” history shift with relocation into another culture with its own historical narratives and concerns? How do such images change as their frames keep shifting? How can this mutability and uncertainty be expressed in the immigrant’s new language, which is not the language of the immigrant’s history, but rather carries the concepts and relations that express its own history? How can translation—domesticating translation, the kind that rewrites the source text to answer the demands of the target culture—be avoided? How does the immigrant learn to speak double?

The poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky will offer a personal take on these questions by reading and discussing poems on the siege of Leningrad in his latest collection, The Feeling Sonnets. Emphasizing the materiality of English in order to make it strange, the poems also incorporate snippets of other languages, including German. Lyn Hejinian called The Feeling Sonnets “an extraordinary and beautiful book,” while Jacqueline Saphra, writing in The Poetry Review (UK), described it as an “immense and multilingual opus of philosophy, language, pun and the absurd.” Ostashevsky will also discuss how the meaning of his poems has been shifted by the wars that took place after their composition.

Host or Publisher Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies