Reading my translations at exciting AWP Offsite

Thanks to Sovay for Victory over the Sun shout out

http://sovay.livejournal.com/809149.htmlhttp://sovay.livejournal.com/809149.html

Thanks to Sovay for the shout out on Live Journal for my translation of Victory over the Sun and for the Červená Barva Press bookstore.

Date: 2016-10-19 17:12 Subject: Well what's to be done I'll go away askance into the 16th century through the quotes over here

Delightful surprise of the week: visiting the brick-and-mortar office of Červená Barva Press in the basement of the Somerville Armory and discovering that not only do they sell their own books, like the chapbook of Aleksei Kruchonykh's libretto for the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1913, trans. Larissa Shmailo 1980/2014) I had originally contacted the publisher about, they are a really lovely tiny used book store. My mother left with Gene Stratton-Porter's The Harvester (1911), Inez Haynes Irwin's Maida's Little School (1926), and Frances Hodgson Burnett's Robin (1922), all first editions—jacketless, but in otherwise quite respectable condition; the first two are books from her childhood and the third neither of us had ever heard of, so fingers crossed it's not terrible. I walked out with Barbara Helfgott Hyett's In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (1986) and the Signet paperback of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), which I did not buy solely for its cover, but you must admit it helps. I am enjoying Victory Over the Sun.

New Staging of Victory over the Sun, Iconic Avant-garde Theater, at BU 4/23

For immediate release

Media Contact:

Anna Winestein
annawine@bu.edu, 617.599.3190
                          
New Staging of Victory over the Sun, Iconic Avant-garde Theater, at BU 4/23

Victory over the Sun, the First Futurist Opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh

Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 7:30 PM

Boston University Photonics Center

8 St. Mary’s Street, Room 206   
(MBTA Green Line “B” to BU Central or “C” to St. Mary’s St.)

Free and open to the public | Reception & book-signing to follow

Boston University’s Revolutionary Voices series will present the mythically iconoclastic Futurist opera Victory over the Sun on Thursday, April 23 in a new experimental staging directed by Anna Winestein.  Concocted in 1913 by the trans-rational poet Aleksey Kruchenykh, the messiah of painterly abstraction Kazimir Malevich, and the avant-garde composer-painter Mikhail Matiushin, Victory, called an opera, was in fact an anti-operatic, anti-theatrical, anti-literary piece of performance art intended to overthrow all conventional art forms.

 

Larissa Shmailo’s original translation, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1980, has undergone a digitized technological update in the Boston University production while retaining the Marx Brothers-like feel of the manic original. The BU performance will feature a digital score written and mastered by Finnish composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, voice performance by Shmailo, visual design by Anna Winestein, interactive digital projections created by Ajjen Joshi, and volunteer actors from the BU community.

 

The performance of this early achievement of Russian Futurism that spanned many art forms, including poetry, art, music and theater, will be followed by comments by historian Harlow Robinson, and a panel discussion among Robinson, Winestein, Joshi, and Shmailo, moderated by Revolutionary Voices co-director Yuri Corrigan. The evening will conclude with a book signing by Shmailo, whose translation is now available from Cervena Barva Press, and a reception.

Revolutionary Voices is sponsored by the Boston University Center for Humanities, the Jewish Cultural Endowment, the Provost Arts Initiative, the Center for the Study of Europe, the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and the Department of English. Victory Over the Sun is presented in collaboration with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative and Cervena Barva Press.

 

Useful links
:

http://www.bu.edu/european/2015/03/12/victory-over-the-sun/

http://www.ballets-russes.com/Victory.html

http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html

Victory over the Sun, Futurism, and Russian Silver Age Poetry in Translation 3/11

For immediate release
Press contacts:
Larissa Shmailo
Larissa_Shmailo@yahoo.com
212-712-9865
Andrey Gritsman
agritsman@msn.com

Victory over the Sun, Futurism, and Russian Silver Age Poetry in Translation
Intercultural Poetry hosted by Andrey Gritsman
Cornelia Street Café
29 Cornelia Street
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
6:00 pm – 7:45 pm
(212) 989-9319

New York City. Iconoclastic Russian theater and poetry of the Russian Silver age will be celebrated at the Cornelia Street Café March 11 with a star-studded program of new translations and original poetry. The event is part of the distinguished Intercultural Poetry series hosted by Andrey Gritsman, which introduces enthusiastic New York audiences to poetry from Russia, Eastern Europe, and many other cultures in stirring and fresh translation.
Noted poet David Lehman (Best American Poetry, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/david-lehman) opens the bill with translations of Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and new original verse. Poet and translator Ilya Bernstein will then read from his new book of translations of the master Silver Age poet Osip Mandelstam (http://www.mgraphics-publishing.com/catalog/194022018/194022018.html)
The final event of the evening is a staged reading of part of Larissa Shmailo’s (www.larissashmailo.com) translation of the libretto of Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenych. Now in print from Červená Barva Press, www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html#Victory%20over%20the%20Sun) Shmailo’s translation was used for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s famous reconstruction of the opera in 1980. The libretto has been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian, and recently at the Garage Museum of Moscow for its retrospective of Russian performative art.
True to the “masculinity” of the original production, the Victory reading will have an all-male cast headed by renowned oral poet Bob Holman (Language Matters PBS series), series host Gritsman, National Endowment of the Art translation award winner Alex Cigale, and Compass Russian poetry translation winner Misha Semenov. The staged reading will be preceded by original poetry celebrating Russian Futurism by Gritsman, Cigale, Semenov, poet and translator and founder of the Compass Award Irina Mashinski http://www.stosvet.net/compass/ArsenyTarkovsky/Tarkovsky.html and Elizabeth Hodges, editor of the St. Petersburg Review (www.stpetersburgreview.com). Original music by Finnish composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com based on Mikhail Matiushin's partially lost score for the original 1913 production will accompany the staged reading and poetry readings.

Victory in Harvard University Library!

Am delighted that Harvard University is ordering a copy of my translation of the first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenych, for its library! Now available from Cervena Barva Press: order a copy for your library today!

Cervena Barva Press announces Victory Over the Sun translated by Larissa Shmailo

Cervena Barva Press announces "Victory Over the Sun"
The First Futurist Opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh
Translated by Larissa Shmailo; edited and with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky

"Victory over the Sun, one of the most important events in Russian Futurism and in the avant-garde in general, is not well recognized in the West. Now in a new edition of Larissa Shmailo's brilliant translation of the text, with a lively introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky, readers can appreciate the significance and innovativeness of the 1913 play. Using Shmailo's translation and Malevich's pathbreaking stage designs, the play was reconstructed and staged in 1980 to great acclaim and remains a signal accomplishment in the history of the avant-garde."
—Gerald Janecek, Author of Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (UCSD, 1996) and Sight and Sound Entwined (Berghahn Books, 2000)

"Velimir Khlebnikov, literally, missed the train on co-penning this one, contributing only a poem to Kruchenykh's libretto. Staged alongside Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy, the 1913 original production of Victory is remembered primarily for Kazimir Malevich's costumes, lighting, and set design, instigations for the Suprematism and Constructivism still to come in 1915 and 1919, respectively…. Nothing is more fitting for this centennial of "Russian Futurianism" than a celebration of Kruchenykh's great contribution to poetry, his Zaum, and not just for its verbal play – the inventive neologizing and the épater-le-bourgeois utopianism – but for the underappreciated antilyricism of his verse, as well. In communicating to us his musicality in English, Larissa Shmailo has done a remarkable job in conferring on Kruchenykh his true due as a poet." —Alex Cigale, Translations Editor of MadHat Lit

"A century ago, Aleksei Kruchenykh was the way out writer's most way out writer. If publishing today, he still would be."
—Richard Kostelanetz, Author of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge, 1993)

http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html
#Victory over the Sun
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-30231-6 | 56 Pages