Literary roundup: Last poet of the Silver Age, exiled writers and a Bulgarian literary conversation

The new issue of Asymptote is out with a lot of great content in many languages and formats – fiction, poetry, drama, graphic novel, video and an especially interesting section of non-fiction including Arnon Grunberg on J.M. Coetzee and ghost stories collected on the streets of Berlin.

From Central and Eastern Europe there are three poems by Arseny Tarkovsky translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev. Tarkovsky, father of the famous filmmaker, has been on a poetic roll as of late in English translation, with work published in Two Lines (one of two poems available online as well as Metres’ blog post on translating the poet) and two short, very powerful poems published in Guernica. All the Tarkovsky poems have been translated by the same translator duo.

Arseny (1907-1989) and Andrei (1932-1986) Tarkovsky

There is also a nice selection of Romanian poetry, with work by MARGENTO translated by Martin Woodside, whose anthology of Romanian poetry published by Calypso was one of the first posts on literalab. There is also the brilliantly titled “unirea urziceni was beating the glasgow rangers” by Ionuț Sociu and translated by Oana Sanziana Marian.

Bulgaria Inside Out

On October 18 at NYC’s Bulgarian Consulate (7pm) there will be a literary conversation with Vladislav Todorov, author of literalab favorite Zift, Rana Dasgupta, author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, and Elizabeth Kostova, best-selling novelist and founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF). Editor-in-chief of Europa Editions Michael Reynolds is moderating. It is part of the EKF’s Reunion Literary Series and admission is free.

Writers in exile

On October 22, also in NYC, you can see a screening of the film Silence or Exile, which looks at five exiled writers including another literalab favorite Horacio Castellanos-Moya (El Salvador/Iowa City) along with Svetlana Alexievitch (Belarus/Berlin), Ma Jian (China/London), Philo Ikonya (Kenya/Oslo), and Mana Neyestani (Iran/Paris). The screening is taking place at The Scandinavia House and will be preceded by a conversation between exiled Chinese writer Yu Jie and Anna Funder, whose debut novel All that I Am deals with the fates of Weimar-era exiles such as Ernst Toller, and which I have yet to read (but have, and plan to, when I have time).