We kick off this new week with video footage of Eugene Ostashevsky delivering his Scalapino-Hejinian Lecture in Innovative Poetics, "Translingualism: A Poetics between Cultures, Nations, and Languages." Originally scheduled for March 17, 2020, Ostashevsky's talk was an early victim of the Covid-19 pandemic, rescheduled until this past September of this year, where it was delivered via Zoom.
This excerpt from the original announcement for the canceled 2020 event seems especially pertinent to the topic of Ostashevsky's talk:
Writing in LARB, Boris Dralyuk calls The Pirate a "raucous modern-day Anatomy of Melancholy, a seriocomic linguistic performance the likes of which we rarely see, in any tongue. It is a beautiful song, broadcast by an outcast whose language is all his own." The Italian newspaper Il Manifesto speaks of The Pirate's "poetics of immigration." The German edition of the book, translated by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck, was awarded the International Poetry Prize from the City of Münster, with the jury praising the original's "polyphonic and polyglot verbal acrobatics" and linguistic multiplicity. For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ostashevsky's work "argues that one must have distance from language, and also an awareness that no language is only 'mine'; it is rather many languages of different times and speakers that collide or coalesce under the name 'English.' Every language is, in a sense, a parrot language." For another German reviewer, The Pirate "deconstructs the strategies of linguistic exclusion concealed by such concepts as 'indigenous,' 'refugee,' and 'native language.'"
Originally the Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics, the Scalapino-Hejinian Lectures in Innovative Poetics started in 2011, the year after Leslie Scalapino's death. As amorphous as its namesake's poetry, the series has had events at a variety of locations over the past decade, including the Pratt Institute, Small Press Traffic, Naropa University, and UC Berkeley. You can browse our complete archive of recordings from the series here; Ostashevsky's lecture can be found here.
