Please join us for a lecture by Diana Burgin (University of Massachusetts) as part of the Women and Resistance in Russia lecture series, convened by Professor Valentina Izmirlieva. The lecture will be followed by a signing of Professor Burgin's new book, Five Hard Pieces: Translations and Readings of Five Long Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (2018).
This event is supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Sophia Parnok was a poet who resisted modernism, but her stylistically “traditional” poems express a unique point of view in Russian poetry. Conversely, Parnok’s one-time lover, Marina Tsvetaeva, staunchly resisted traditional poetic diction, yet each of her stylistically “unique” long poems basically tells the same time-worn lyrical story. This paradox is a central concern of Professor Diana Burgin's recent book on Tsvetaeva’s long poems, Five Hard Pieces. In this talk, Burgin will discuss certain “unique-traditional” passages in these poems in order to show how some of them seem to deny a rather ordinary long-dead love affair while all of them resist conventional translation of their unique living words.
Diana Lewis Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has published widely on Russian 19th and 20th century literature, culture, and gender studies. She has also translated Russian poetry and prose, including, with Professor Katherine O’Connor, their widely acclaimed translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Burgin is internationally known for her books on the Russian 20th century poets Sophia Parnok and Marina Tsvetaeva, most recently, Five Hard Pieces. Translations & Readings of Five Long Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva.
WOMEN AND RESISTANCE LECTURE SERIES
Cosponsored by:
The Harriman Institute
Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Office of the Dean of the Humanities
Columbia-Barnard Slavic Department
February 6, 6pm - Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
“Mono/Dia/Polyphony: Muratova, Sound and Image”
Ella Weed Room, 223 Milbank Hall, Barnard
February 13, 6:30pm - Yevgenia Albats (New Times, Moscow)
“Anna Politkovskaya: Prevailing Against All Odds”
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room, 1219 International Affairs Building, Harriman Institute
March 14, 4pm - Diana Burgin (University of Massachusetts)
“Tsvetaeva, (Parnok) and the ‘Unique-Traditional’ in Poetry, Life, and Translation”
The lecture will be followed by a signing of Professor Burgin's new book, Five Hard Pieces: Translations and Readings of Five Long Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (2018).
754 Schermerhorn Extension, IRWGS
April 4, 6:15pm - Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörn University, Sweden)
“Lidiya Ginzburg’s Testimony from Inside the Leningrad Siege: An Unreconciled Memory, an Unwanted Heritage, and a Challenge for Today”
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room, 1219 International Affairs Building, Harriman Institute
