Alphabet Soup: Life Across Languages. An Evening with Eugene Ostashevsky
Thu 25 June 202625 Jun 2026
06:30—08:00 PM
Book Tickets
Book Livestream Tickets
Description
Join us for an evening with Eugene Ostashevsky, a writer, poet and translator known for his ingenious play with language, who engages themes of migration, identity, and personal and collective histories through his translingual writing. In conversation with Yasha Klots and Robert Chandler, Ostashevsky will present his latest book – Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father (Tamizdat Project & Rab-Rab Press; 2026) – alongside readings from his earlier poetry collection The Feeling Sonnets(Carcanet; 2022).
Alphabet Soupcollects the sayings of Ostashevsky’s two multilingual daughters from toddlers to teenagers. As their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin, the girls communicate in a witty and colourful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origins. The book reflects a cycle from Ostashevsky’s earlier collection The Feeling Sonnets, in which he explores bringing up his daughters in a foreign language, as well as the role of language in emotions, the Blockade history of his native Leningrad, and the metamorphosis of a life in translation.
Both books negotiate the layers of language and culture. They unpick etymologies, unform and reform words and sentences, morphing meanings. They lay bare the building blocks of a language – and of learning a language. Ostashevsky asks: does who we are determine the way we speak, or is it the other way around? What stories and histories do different languages carry? What creativity and poetry can be found in the unstructured space between languages – and what emerges when languages collide?
Speakers
Eugene Ostashevsky
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and now lives in both New York and Berlin. His recent book of poetry, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet, 2022) examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity.An earlier collection, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi(NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. As translator and scholar of avantgarde and experimental writing, Ostashevsky edited and translated over a dozen titles, including OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP, 2006), F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (with Ainsley Morse and Galina Rymbu; isolarii, 2020), and Lucky Breaksby Yevgenia Belorusets (Pushkin Press, 2022). His writing has been highly commended by The Forward Book of Poetryand Best American Poetry, and his prizes include the 2019 City of Münster Prize for International Poetry, the National Translation Award, and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Literature Fellowship.
Yasha Klots
Yasha Klots is an associate professor of Russian literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests are book history, Russian and East European émigré literature and culture, urbanism, and Gulag narratives (particularly Varlam Shalamov). He is the author of several books, includingTamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era(Cornell UP, 2023), and the director of theTamizdat Project, a public scholarship and charity initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
Robert Chandler
Robert Chandler’s translations and co-translations from Russian include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Hamid Ismailov’s Central Asian novel The Railway and many works by Teffi, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman. He is the (co)-editor and main translator of three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales, and (together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski) of Russian poetry. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his own poems have appeared in the TLS and elsewhere.
