Book Talk & Reading. Relative Genitive by Val Vinokur

Please join us for an evening with Val Vinokur(Chair of Liberal Arts and Director of Literary Translation, The New School) who will introduce and read from his new book, Relative Genitive (Poets & Traitors Press, 2018).

In Relative Genitive, Vinokur translates two of the great Russian poets of the early twentieth century: the Acmeist neo-classicist Osip Mandelstam and the Futurist revolutionary Vladimir Mayakovsky. This unlikely combination is elegantly woven together by the thread of Vinokur’s own poems, echoing the sound and spirit of the poets he has translated, and collapsing the distance between high culture and low, beauty and wreckage, origin and destination.

Val Vinokur was born in Moscow and immigrated to Miami Beach as a child. He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern 2009), and has published poetry, translations, and prose in The Boston Review, New American Writing, The Literary Review, McSweeney’s, and The Massachusetts Review. His co-translations with Rose Réjouis were recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literature at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions, was published in 2017. Vinokur is the founding editor of Poets & Traitors Press.