Authors

Vladimir Feshchenko¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

The paper considers several cases of Russophone poetry of the last decades, which is positioned by the authors themselves as inter- or multilingual. An illuminating example of translingual verse is the work of E. Mnatsakanova, which involves multiple foreignisms in several languages. The borderline position between two linguistic and poetic cultures (Russian and Austrian-German) also affected the linguistic poetics of her texts, which incorporate various national idioms into the space of visual-and-musical verse. The second part of the paper is devoted to very recent practices of translingual writing by poets migrating between Russia and other countries: E. Ostashevsky, N. Skandiaka, I. Krasnoper, S. Kamill. This kind of writing could be called the poetry of the “Russian borderland” (russkoe porubezhie). Unlike the Russian diaspora, to which Elizaveta Mnatsakanova clearly belonged, the “abroad” (zarubezhie) is not strictly limited to emigrant boundaries. Contemporary translingual poets do not necessarily recognize themselves outside their country of birth or nationality - they are rather nomads, constantly moving from country to country, from language to language. Such kind of writing problematizes borderliness itself, the borderline state of different languages, countries and cultures. 

References

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Wanner A. Russian-English Literary Translingualism // The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism (ed. by S. Kellman, N. Lvovich). New York: Routledge, 2021.