Lia Purpura, Parasol Mushroom (detail), featured in AGNI 102

I was killed in nineteen hundred sixteen

Translated from the Ukrainian by J. Kates and Bohdan Rubchak
Published:

Moisei Fishbein

Moisei Fishbein, born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, emigrated to Israel in 1979 and works in Munich, Germany. His publications include three books of poetry, Apokrif (1996), Zbirka bez nazvy (1985), and Yambove-kolo (1974), as well as children’s literature, literary translations, and nonfiction. (updated 1998)

J. Kates

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press), Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing), and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press). He has a full book, The Briar Patch, coming in the fall of 2012 (Hobblebush Books). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin; and Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of four books of Latin American poetry. (updated 7/2012)

Bohdan Rubchak

Bohdan Rubchak was born in 1927 in western Ukraine and now lives in New York City. He has written six volumes of poetry, two novels, eight plays, and has served as literary editor of the Ukrainian magazine Suchasnit. He has collaborated on translations of poetry into English with Davis Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, and Mark Rudman, among others.

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