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Please join the Harriman Institute for For the Desk Drawer: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde in Translation: A Reading by Matvei Yankelevich. Yankelevich, a poet, translator, and editor, will read from his translations of Daniil Kharms, Osip Mandelstam, and Alexander Vvedensky, among others, as well as some of his original verse. His translation of Mandelstam’s “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” was published in the March 7, 2022, issue of the New Yorker, together with his reading of the poem in English and in Russian.
Matvei Yankelevich’s translations from Russian include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), as well as works by Elena Guro, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and several contemporary Russian-language poets. He has been awarded fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities, and was a co-recipient of the 2014 National Translation Award for his co-translation (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of An Invitation for Me To Think by Alexander Vvedensky (NYRB). He is the author of several books of poetry, including Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists) and Boris by the Sea (Octopus), and the chapbooks Dead Winter (Fonograf) and From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia). His poems and translations have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Caesura, Circumference, Harpers, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Perfect Vacuum, Prelude, and other print and online journals. In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse where he edited and designed books, periodicals, and ephemera for more than twenty years and curated the Eastern European Poets Series. As of 2022, he is editor of World Poetry, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation.
