switch the language: New York times on Map of Poetical Actions
With this post we are continue new section (with the tag that will allow you to easily find its posts), in which we will publish foreign-language materials devoted to [Translit]. On the one hand, a lot of such materials have started appearing, on the other hand, they haven't been systematized on the blog at all but have just come through here and there as a one-off aberration.
We have never limited ourselves to a Russian-language audience, striving not only to translate Russian ad bring it into correspondence with other languages but also to serve as an apparatus for the transmission and re-coding of messages in foreign languages, in other words, a mechanism for the systematic defamiliarization of our own language in both the linguistic and poetic sense. The time has come to extend the metaphor of defamiliarizing translation ("translit") into the regular practice of publishing in foreign languages.
Here we will put poems and articles by the authors of [Translit] that have been translated and published in foreign languages (which will also allow us to study the infrastructure of foreign-language resources devoted to experimental literature), interviews from newspapers and journals of a wider profile, and also announcements and reports on [Translit] events that take place abroad. If you would like to limit your reading to the materials in this section, you can subscribe to the RSS-feed with the tag "switch the language.Allowed a Space in Russia for Criticism, Artists Have Fun With It
By SALLY McGRANE
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Allowed a Space in Russia for Criticism, Artists Have Fun With It.
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That Russia could see a return to this kind of cultural repression was one concern of the participants. “Whether Manifesta is here or not, it is really important for us to include our view and our voices in the public space, because this possibility could end,” said Pavel Arsenev, a poet and activist based in St. Petersburg. Mr. Arsenev, 28, came up with the popular antigovernment slogan “You don’t even represent us,” which in Russian also means, “You cannot even imagine us.”
Last month, as part of Manifesta, Mr. Arsenev organized a day of “poetic actions” in the city. On a Saturday morning, young volunteers wearing sandwich boards handed out poems by Bertolt Brecht at metro stations (“The way things are, won’t stay that way,” read one placard; “Who is responsible for the fact that oppression still exists?” read another). Later, in the shadow of the Peter and Paul Fortress - once home to an infamous political prison - Kirill Medvedev, a poet, singer and literary critic, read aloud from the poetry of political prisoners.
Waiting out a brief hailstorm on Arts Square, Anton Kuryshev said he had traveled from Moscow to attend the poetic actions. He was looking forward to hearing a speech originally delivered at the first congress of Soviet writers in 1934. “Now the situation is more like the ’30s maybe,” he said.
Sergei Medvedev, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said it was only natural that artists were staging performances in response to current events in Russia. “In the conditions of severely limited political freedom, when the opposition and the free press have been almost entirely eliminated, contemporary art has to step in,” Mr. Medvedev wrote in an email.
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www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/world/europe/allowed-a-space-for-criticism-artists-in-russia-have-fun-with-it.html