Your Language My Ear (YLME) is a translation symposium gathering Russophone and Anglophone poets along with scholars, translators, and students of Russophone poetry for intensive translations of contemporary poetry from Russian to English and vice versa. The first YLME took place in the spring of 2011, when a grant from the Open World Program of CEC ArtsLink, supplemented by funds from the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Initiatives and Kelly Writers House, brought eight Russian poets to the University of Pennsylvania, including assistant professor in Russian and Slavic studies Maya Vinokour, then a graduate student in comparative literature and literary theory, and Kevin M. F. Platt.
YLME’s innovative practice includes virtual group collaboration on draft translations via a document cloud, involving multiple participants who each bring their own unique skills to bear—from bilingual scholars, students, and translators to monolingual poets. After some months of this virtual labor, a physical gathering brings everyone together to work in small groups to perfect these initial translations and to present them in readings to the public.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, YLME has collaborated with PEN America to create communities of resistance and hope, working through commonalities of struggle toward a future world of peace. The poetry and corresponding translations from the 2022 and 2023 gatherings will be published as a single YLME anthology by Deep Vellum Books, a Dallas-based publisher of literature in translation. Translators of contemporary Russian and Russophone poetry include Catherine Ciepiela, Ainsley Morse, Timmy Straw, and Bela Shayevich, who worked together to translate “Kontur” by Igor Gulin.
Catherine Ciepiela is professor of Russian at Amherst College. She is the coeditor of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems (NYRB Classics, 2006), translated by Paul Schmidt.
Ainsley Morse is a translator, teacher, and scholar. Her translation work includes Goat Song by Konstantin Vaginov (NYRB, 2024); Communiqués by Maria Galina (Cicada Press, 2024); and F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (isolarii, 2020).
Timmy Straw is from Oregon and is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A poet, musician, and translator, they live in Iowa City.
Bela Shayevich is a Russian American writer, translator, and visual artist. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2017), for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize by the Society of Authors. Her other translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (Ecco, 2021) and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See: Selected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), which she cotranslated with Morse.