Two Lines Press joins Pittsburgh’s White Whale Bookstore to celebrate the fifth installment of the Calico series, This Is Us Losing Count, a bilingual edition of eight contemporary Russian poets and seven translators that demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past.

Contributors Elina Alter, Il’ia Karagulin, and Eugene Ostashevsky join writer Alina Stefanescu to discuss their translations of Alla Gorbunova, Oksana Vasyakina, Ekaterina Simonova, and Galina Rymbu.

Register online.

Purchase a copy of the book.

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In This Is Us Losing Count, eight contemporary Russian poets obliterate old conventions in their efforts to reckon with the past. Here memories take the form of housewares, specters, city streets, and even foods that can weigh down, haunt, disorient, and bloat but never quite sate us. Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter) surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise have been lost to time. Ekaterina Simonova (translated by Il’ia Karagulin) dwells in her dying grandmother’s hallucinatory final days, spent convening with deceased friends and relatives, visible only to her. And Galina Rymbu (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky) assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” In sinuous translations of verse both irreverent and sentimental, this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series asks to what extent we must remember in order to reinvent.

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Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova’s short story collection It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) and Oksana Vasyakina’s novel Wound (Catapult) are forthcoming. She is the coeditor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.

Il’ia Karagulin is a poet, translator, copy editor, and doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where they research queerness, transness, and disability in twentieth-century Russian literature and poetry. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they now live in New Haven, Connecticut.

Eugene Ostashevsky’s most recent translation project was F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, an anthology he coedited with Ainsley Morse and Galina Rymbu.