Ostashevsky & Rasuleva: ALPHABET LOSTLINGUAL

Multilingual World Poetry from Berlin!

Dinara Rasuleva (Poetry)
Eugene Ostashevsky(poetry)

Hosted by Martin Jankowski

“Alphabet Soup” brings together the sayings of two multilingual girls, as written down by their father, a poet. When their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin, the girls communicate in a witty and colorful language they’ve developed themselves, effortlessly blending words from different backgrounds. Does the way we speak determine who we are—or is it the other way around? “Alphabet Soup” shows us how the girls’ language changes and lets us witness their transformation from toddlers to teenagers.

“Lostlingual” by Dinara Rasuleva is the first volume in the “sdvig” series, which is dedicated to translingual avant-garde literature. In this volume, Berlin-based poet Rasuleva returns to Tatar, the language of her childhood. As an adult, she had rarely used this language and had never before used it as a creative writer—the native language of her people, which was suppressed by Russian colonialism. She sets out to write poems in Tatar as she remembers it, without consulting dictionaries or grammar books. The result is a collection of fragile and liberating translingual poems in which Tatar, English, German, and Russian engage with one another, react to one another, and transform one another.

This event will take place in German, English, Russian, Tatar, and all sorts of other languages!