FALL 2022

Shakespeare: Homecoming. Hunter Students Translate Shakespeare back into English. With Claudia Serea and Vasily Lvov. 
September 22, Thursday, 6:30 pm

Living Pictures. A poetry reading and book talk by Polina Barskova
September 23, Friday, 6 pm 
Shakespeare: Homecoming. Hunter Students Translate Shakespeare back into English. Organized and curated by Vasily Lvov, with the participation of Claudia Serea. September 22, Thursday, 6:30 - 8 pm. Room 1337 Hunter West. In-person, with proof of vaccination. RSVP required.  

Please join us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of National Translation Month with its editor-in-chief, poet and translator Claudia Serea, and the alumni of the Fall 2021 Russian-English Literary Translation course, whose experimental translations of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 87 back into the English language from seven Russian translations are being published this month by NTM. Discussion open to the public. 

There is not a person however faintly familiar with the business of translation who does not know that something is unavoidably lost in it. “Lost” is a word that evokes Odyssean nostalgia—a dream of homecoming as a response to inevitable separation. Among the most archetypical examples are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In similar vein, Walter Benjamin writes in his scandalous and messianic “The Task of the Translator” that any expression in a national language, such as English or Russian, takes place after the original sin, the perfect babel, of “alien tongues” and that the only antidote is the return to “pure language”—an aspiration also reflected in Milton’s and Proust’s new testaments: Paradise Regain’d and Time Regained. 
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To test Benjamin’s theory, the graduate students of Russian-English Literary Translation course, subtitled “From Russian with Love” and taught by Vasily Lvov at Hunter College in the fall of 2021, undertook the homecoming of Shakespeare back into English from the Russian of his translators: Nikolai Gerbel, Modest Tchaikovsky, Samuil Marshak, Alexander Finkel, Igor Fradkin, and Vladimir Gandelsman. Some of them struggled with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 in the nineteenth century, like Nikolai Gerbel and Modest Tchaikovsky (the brother of the great composer), others in the twentieth, while Gandelsman, one of the finest living Russian poets, in the twenty-first. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor and then the elevator to the 13th floor. CUNY policy states that to enter the campus, visitors are required to show proof of either full vaccination or a negative PCR test within seven days of their intended visit date. Everyone MUST complete the Cleared4 Access Process, where they will be asked to upload a photo of their vaccination card or a negative test result. The Cleared4 Access Process can be accessed here. We recommend that you complete this process prior to your visit in order to avoid a delay in entering the campus. 
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Living Pictures. A poetry reading and book talk by Polina Barskova. September 23, Friday, 6 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. In-person, with proof of vaccination. RSVP required. Co-hosted by the REVERIE Poetry Series (CUNY Graduate Center). 

Living Pictures refers to the parlor game of tableaux vivants, in which people dress up in costume to bring scenes from history back to life. It’s a game about survival, in a sense, and what it means to be a survivor is the question that Polina Barskova explores in the scintillating literary amalgam of Living Pictures. Barskova, one of the most admired and controversial figures in a new generation of Russian writers, first made her name as a poet; she is also known as a scholar of the catastrophic siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Living Pictures, Barskova writes with caustic humor and wild invention about traumas past and present, historical and autobiographical, exploring how we cope with experiences that defy comprehension. She writes about her relationships with her adoptive father and her birth father; about sex, wanted and unwanted; about the death of a lover; about Turner and Picasso; and, in the final piece, she mines the historical record in a chamber drama about two lovers sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege of Leningrad who slowly, operatically, hopelessly, stage their own deaths. -- The New York Review of Books 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. CUNY policy states that to enter the campus, visitors are required to show proof of either full vaccination or a negative PCR test within seven days of their intended visit date. Everyone MUST complete the Cleared4 Access Process, where they will be asked to upload a photo of their vaccination card or a negative test result. The Cleared4 Access Process can be accessed here. We recommend that you complete this process prior to your visit in order to avoid a delay in entering the campus. 
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: russhunter@hunter.cuny.edu