Cardinal Points – Talk with Irina Mashinski
Irina Mashinski is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet literary project, as well as the Cardinal Points literary journal. The Journal, published in New York and “dedicated to de-stalinisation of the air”, features poetry, fiction, novels, translations, visual art, and interviews.
Website: http://www.stosvet.net/union/Mash/index.html
Lothar Quinkenstein talks with Irina Mashinski about living in two languages, writing poetry and the art of translation.
Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow; she graduated summa cum laude from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she later completed her Ph.D. studies, specializing in Paleoclimatology and General Theory of Landscape. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian), most recently “Delaver” [Delaware]. Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil (New York). She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). She is the recipient of several literary awards and fellowships, and, with Boris Dralyuk, of the First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.
Lothar Quinkenstein has published poems, short stories, and translations from Polish in various publications, including the poetry volume Beim Stimmen der Saiten (While Tuning the Strings, Saarbrücken 2007) and contributions to two important anthologies of contemporary German verse, An Deutschland gedacht (Having Thought of Germany) and Versnetze_zwei (Verse Networks_two, both 2009). In 2010, he was one of the feature poets at the International Poetry Festival Translations 2010, held at Bates College. His recent novel, Souterrain (in German), has been published in Berlin by Fototapeta publishing house.
