People still seem to be finding my Ba Ren Chi album on Jamendo, with just under 1000 listens and dozens of downloads over its first month of being out. This makes me very happy. I wrote earlier that one surprise was how many more listens the song “Meaner Than That” had than most of the… Continue reading Lalo Sì
Category: Latest Post
Jergović Broadsided
A friend sent me a gift in the mail a while back with a note that said “I took an intensive, week-long letterpress workshop last week, […] and our second assignment was setting and printing a ‘broadside.’ I loved the quote you posted on Facebook […] from your translation of Miljenko Jergović, so I hope… Continue reading Jergović Broadsided
Propp: Brilliant but Boring
I have been translating, with two colleagues, Vladimir Propp’s Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Исторические корни волшебной сказки), a very important book that has for some reason never made it into English. It is a tour de force in many ways and truly a follow-up to his widely known Morphology of the Folktale (Морфология сказки),… Continue reading Propp: Brilliant but Boring
Teaching Ukrainian Culture as if it were Russian
A former public affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine explained to me a few years ago how they were trying to help Ukrainian institutions to train Ukrainians to tell Ukraine’s story to the world, “because,” he said, “at this point wherever you look, Russia is telling Ukraine’s story.” I thought of this comment… Continue reading Teaching Ukrainian Culture as if it were Russian
Teaching Ilya Repin
I have used Ilya Repin’s 1883 Procession of the Cross in the Kursk District in class many times over the years, especially as a part of teaching aspects of social activism in the art of nineteenth-century Russia. The painting’s contrast of abject poverty among the people to the lavish richness of the Church is easy… Continue reading Teaching Ilya Repin
Bringhurst on Translation
I just read Robert Bringhurst’s “The Polyhistorical Mind” lecture, which is the first chapter in his 2006 book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, and was struck by this observation: “Few people earn a degree in European Studies or Asian Studies without acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of a European or Asian language. Students… Continue reading Bringhurst on Translation
Music Saving
COVID-19 isolated me, as it did most of us, in ways that we could not have anticipated. I found a variety of ways to not go crazy. One was to rediscover music, not listening so much as making, something I have done off and on for many years since I was a teenager. In the… Continue reading Music Saving
Racing to 2019
Quite a few things have happened since I last posted, so much that I am having trouble remembering what happened when, what I wrote down and what I didn’t, where I traveled, and how many people’s names I’ve forgotten since I spoke with them. Apologies for my tardy replies and general slowness. We got a… Continue reading Racing to 2019
What’s a Person Worth
My colleague Alexey Vdovin at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow wrote to ask for an article I published in 2003 as part of the proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Slavists, which was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia the year before that, and since I don’t have a definitive version of that article… Continue reading What’s a Person Worth
Deliver us
Just translated and adapted this from the Polish original, which was written by Adam Mickiewicz ca. 1830. It seems pretty appropriate for our time. Almighty God! The children of a democratic nation raise their pretty damn-well armed hands to you from every quarter of the world (some of them just keep inexplicably exiting the… Continue reading Deliver us
Russell Scott Valentino 