1927: Marina Tsvetaeva

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This event will be held in English.

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One hundred years ago the poet Marina Tsvetaeva was living in Paris, one of many Russians living in exile after the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Over the space of a few months in the summer of 1926, she had a passionate and brilliant correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke – one of the great poetic epistolary exchanges. After his death in 1927 she dedicated to him two long poems, masterpieces of European modernism. During this rendez-vous I’ll read from my translations of the poems and talk about this glorious meeting of poetic minds.

Sasha Dugdale is a writer and translator. She has published six books of poetry with Carcanet, most recently: Deformations (2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes and The Strongbox (2024), which won the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award and was shortlisted for the London Hellenic Award. She has written for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement and edited Modern Poetry in Translation. She has enjoyed a long collaboration with the writer Maria Stepanova as a translator and has won a number of PEN Translates Awards as well as being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her translation of Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory won the MLA Lois Roth Award. Dugdale is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

This event will be recorded and may be broadcast as part of our SNF Rendez-vous de l’Institut podcast series. By participating and asking questions, you consent to the use of your voice in this context.