Words Without Borders, II

[Deborah Hoffman]

I'm the translator of the Gorlova piece and would welcome any comments about my decision to retain the narrative present tense, a more common device in English than in Russian, in order to retain the immediacy of the text.
   
  I think what I enjoy the most about this text is the ambiguity of the caregiver's feelings toward the caregivee, something rarely explored with or without a Golem involved.
   
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:41:12 -0400
From: Melissa Frazier 
Subject: Words Without Borders, II

Dear friends,

Again I'm posting this on behalf of a friend and former student--it's the
second part of the Words Without Borders Russia issue. Please direct any
questions/comments to Words Without Borders.

Thank you,

Melissa Frazier


PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Rohan/Dedi

wordswithoutborders at gmail.com


DREAMS OF OUR RUSSIAN SUMMER


The Russian idyll at Words without Borders, www.wordswithoutborders.org
stretches
into the languid weeks of August, as writers new and established reveal a
country
where gritty reality shades into blurry dreamscape. In this liminal land,
a woman
molds her grandmother into a golem and a seamstress remakes both clothes
and her
past. From known luminary Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to newer lights,
Nadezhda Gorlova
and Maxim Kantor (featured below), select Russian jewels shine all month at
www.wordswithoutborders.org.


Nadezhda Gorlova was born in 1975 in Moscow, where she lives today. In her
story
Golem a woman struggles with the spectre of the past, figured in the
images of the
Golem that inhabit her waking dreams and which, finally, tragically, she
confuses
with her infirm grandmother. Gorlova's story is a heartbreaking, comic and
lyrical
contemplation of our relation with the past, the care we extend to those
who rely on
us most, and the richly evocative world of Jewish mysticism.


The artist and writer Maxim Kantor was born in Moscow in 1957. He
published his
first collection of short stories, House in the Wasteland, in 1993. In
this issue we
feature an excerpt from his 2006 two-volume novel A Drawing Textbook,
which made
news when it became Russia's fastest selling first novel. A Drawing
Textbook follows
in the tradition of epic Russian novels; a combination of expansive
narrative and
treatises on art and history, it provides a rare and insightful view into
the life
of culture in modern Russia. In our chosen excerpt, a historian and his
younger
colleague face off in a quirky debate over Derrida and Plato over rounds
of vodka at
Moscow's Scholar's House.


These and other stories in our August issue of Words Without Borders, are
online now
at www.wordswithoutborders.org. For more information about Nadezhda
Gorlova, Maxim
Kantor, or any voices on Words without Borders please contact Rohan or
Dedi at
wordswithoutborders at gmail.com .


###
Words without Borders ( www.wordswithoutborders.org ) is an online
magazine for
literature in translation that undertakes to promote international
communication
through publication of the world's best writing—selected and translated
by a
distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals.
Its
monthly publications include fiction, nonfiction, poetry and contextual
essays, all
available for free online.


_________________________________
Melissa Frazier
Russian Language and Literature
Sarah Lawrence College
1 Mead Way
Bronxville, NY 10708

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