Inna Krasnoper

This chapbook of translingual writing features poems in English with interventions by Russian, German, Ukrainian, and French. As languages jostle each other, translate, and resist translation, the book simultaneously slips away from comprehension and overexplains itself. Problematizing categories like native language, translatability, and the separation of languages, this book provokes an active mode of reading and localizing oneself, seeking points of contact.

Details

30 Pages

Publication date: January 12, 2024

Poetry, Translation Poetics

Letterpress cover, long-stitch-bound

Reviews/Excerpts

Review by Venya Gushchin in Full Stop

Poems in Ghost Proposal

Praise

“Inna Krasnoper uses multilingualism to explore the motor-rhythmic properties of interlingual paronymy. As a professional dancer and performer, she is interested in movement, the alternation of words at the junction of languages—Russian, German and English. These experiments, on the one hand, are in the tradition of American poetic minimalism and phonic poetry, going back to Gertrude Stein and Jackson Mac Low. On the other hand, they take up Elizaveta Mnatsakanova’s poetics of verbal music. Yet translanguaging in her work is not only performed but also commented on. Creating this kind of poetry is a playful and plastic way of learning languages through the process of writing, as well as of learning how to translate and self-translate across languages. The result of these verbal operations is a moveable language that can slip through the tiniest cracks of interlingual sounds.”

—Vladimir Feshchenko, Russian and American Poetry of Experiment