Translating Tsvetaeva: Nina Kossman

Translating Tsvetaeva: Nina Kossman

Wednesday, Oct 07, 2020 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location:
Globus Books YouTube Channel

Globus Books Literary Translation Round Table presents a reading of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry by Nina Kossman, a poet and translator. Kossman will read poetry in Russian, translations and will speak about the challenges of translations. She will answer questions about Tsvetaeva's art and work.

This event is in English and will be held on Zoom on October 7, 2020, at 4.00 pm PST (SF), 7 pm EST (NY). There will be a limited number of seats; please contact Globus Books via FB messenger to register. We will also be live streaming the event on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobusBooksSF/videos) and later will share the edited version of the program.

Marina Tsvetaeva is one of the most beloved Russian poets. She was born in Moscow to a family of a professor and founder of the Museum of Fine Arts and a concert pianist and published her first collection of poems, Evening Album, at 18. Tsvetaeva got married to Sergey Efron in 1912 and during the Civil War, after the Revolution of 1917, her husband joined the White Army. She lost her younger daughter to starvation in Moscow in 1919. In 1922, she emigrated to Berlin, then Prague, and in 1925 to Paris, enduring extreme poverty in exile. Efron became an informant for CheKa (later NKVD, KGB, FSB), the Soviet secret police, and the family was ostracized by the Russian immigrant circles. After their return to the USSR in 1929, Efron was executed and her older daughter was sent to a Gulag camp. She committed suicide in the evacuation during WWII, on August 31, 1941.

Nina Kossman is a Moscow born, bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in Moscow, Philadelphia, and New York. Her English short stories and poems have been published in US, Canadian and British journals. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary journals. Among her published works are two books of poems in Russian and English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two collections of short stories, an anthology (Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths) published by Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her new book of English poems, Other Shepherds, has just been published. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. She received a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA translation fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundacion Valparaiso. She lives in New York.

This program is produced and hosted by author Zarina Zabrisky.