Please join us for an October "mini-series" of lectures by exciting younger translators of Russian literature.  This will be a great opportunity to learn from and to meet professional translators in our field.  The mini-series is sponsored by the Amherst College Copeland Colloquium, whose theme this year is "Words in Transit: the Cultures of Translation."  Please contact Catherine Ciepiela (caciepiela@amherst.edu) for further information.

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KEITH GESSEN: "Should I translate this Book?"
Wednesday, October 1, 2014 at 4:30; Fayerweather Hall 115.

Keith Gessen is the author of the novel All The Sad Young Literary Men, a founding editor of n+1, and the editor and co-translator of Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. He also translated Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award.
 He is also a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

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JEFF PARKER: "Translation: Writing in a Voice Not Your Own"
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 at 4:30; Fayerweather Hall 115
Jeff Parker's most recent book is Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal. He co-edited the anthologies Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States. He co-translated the novel Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin, and he teaches in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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MATVEI YANKELEVICH: "The Art of Mistranslation: Contemporary Poets Taking LIberties with Baudelaire, Dickinson, Shakespeare and Trakl"
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 at 4:30; Fayerweather Hall 115.

Matvei Yankelevich is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and several chapbooks. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis), and has contributed translations to several books and anthologies, including Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky (FSG), and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa), Hunter College, and Colorado College, and is a member of Writing Faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. In Fall 2014, he is teaching "The Art of the Book" at Columbia University's School of the Arts and is a visiting professor at Wesleyan University.

Professor Catherine Ciepiela, Chair of the Russian Department, is a member of the Steering Committee for the “Words in Transit” project of this year’s Copeland Colloquium