Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 15, 2024 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a symposium devoted to Maria Stepanova’s new poem, “Holy Winter.” This literary symposium brings together the author, her translators and publishers, and literary scholars to reflect on the poem as a literary artifact, a social fact, and a reading experience.
How is a poem that relates to the catastrophic events of the day—the pandemic and the war—conceived and written? Maria Stepanova will share her reflections on the creative process. How does the poem reach its readers, in the country of its origin and beyond? What is the role of publishers, editors, translators? What is lost (and gained) in translation? Stepanova’s translators and publishers will speak about their work.
What poetic themes, instruments and forms are used in this highly innovative work of literature? How do we attend to the many voices speaking in the poem? How do we relate to its complex intertextual fabric? How do the poem’s recurrent imagery and metaphors—exile, confinement, war—speak to us about our own experience as we transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century? Literary scholars will offer their interpretations as well as readerly impressions.
Program
1:00 – 2:45pm | Panel I: The Making of the Poem
Moderator: Irina Paperno (Berkeley)
- Maria Stepanova (Berlin)
- Olga Radetskaja (Berlin)
- Sasha Dugdale (London)
- Katharina Raabe (Berlin)
- Tynan Kogane (New York)
3:00 – 4:45pm | Panel II: Interpreting the Poem
Moderator: Mark Lipovetsky (New York)
- Lyubov Golburt (Berkeley)
- Irina Paperno (Berkeley)
- Stephanie Sandler (Cambridge, MA)
- Irina Shevelenko (Madison, WI)
- Eugene Ostashevsky (New York and Berlin)
