During an unusually cold week in late February/early March, internationally renowned poet Polina Barskova visited Dickinson to read her poetry in both Russian and English. While on campus she also held workshops with students in several Russian Department classes, included “Workshop in Translation,” a senior seminar, and “Russia and the West,” a 100-level comparative civilizations course that investigates Russia’s historically complicated relationship with various conceptions of “Western culture.” Students in the course on translation worked together with Barskova to translate a cycle of her poetry from Russian into English, discussing the difficulty of translating historical references, Soviet terminology, and cultural allusions for an English-speaking audience.The Russian Department at Dickinson has a long history of bringing Russia’s most innovative poets to campus; in recent years, students have had the opportunity to meet with Dmitrii Prigov, Vera Pavlova, Alexei Tsvetkov, Tatiana Shcherbina, Lev Rubenstein, Psoy Korolenko, and Kirill Medvedev. See Russian Poetry at Dickinson
Russian poetry at Dickinson for more information
