“Once level with us . . .”

Mikhail Aizenberg is an architect, poet, and essayist. Born in Moscow in 1948, he has been writing poems since the mid 1960s and is also a chronicler and critic of contemporary Russian poetry. His most recent collection, V Metre ot Nas (A Meter Away from Us), was published in 2004; excerpts from it appeared in a bilingual chapbook as Less than a Meter (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). He contributed poems to and wrote an introductory note for the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999). Zephyr is also publishing a selection of Aizenberg’s poems, Say Thank You, in 2007. “Once level with us…” will appear in the fall in New Russian Poetry, an anthology to be published by Dalkey Archive Press as part of a bilingual project of the National Endowment for the Arts. (updated 2007)

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)