Important Note

Registration required. Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community.  To that end, all visiting alumni and guests must meet the University requirement of full vaccination status in order to attend in-person events.  Vaccination cards may be checked upon entry to all venues.  

Ainsley Morse, preeminent translator of Russian verse (and prose), will read from her extensive catalog of translations. Selections from late Soviet poets, such as Nekrasov, Kholin, Satunovsky, Prigov, and Grigoriev; contemporary Russophone poets such as Vasyakina, Galina and Stepanova, and perhaps a few prose excerpts (from Egunov-Nikolev, Vaginov, and Sokolovsky). During the course of her reading, Morse will trace the “red thread” of these disparate strands of translation. This event is part of our Contemporary Culture Series.

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Russian Department at Dartmouth College and is a translator of Russian, Ukrainian, and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children’s literature and contemporary poetry. In addition to The Fine Feats, other recent publications include the monograph World Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021), as well as Permanent Evolution, a collection of theoretical essays by the Formalist critic Yuri Tynianov (ASP; edited and translated with Philip Redko), the anthology F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020, co-edited with Galina Rymbu and Eugene Ostashevsky). Dmitri Prigov, Soviet Texts, translated by Simon Schuchat, with AM (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), and Igor Kholin, Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems, translated with Bela Shayevich (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017).