Stephanie Sandler translates Elena Fanailova

Stephanie Sandler’s translation of Russian poet Elena Fanailova’s poem “Lena i Lena” (“Lena and Lena”) has just gone up as a feature on Jacket2. Sandler introduces her translation by mapping out beautifully how Fanailova’s work undoes the false binary of self-fashioning or impersonality that has plagued accounts of modern poetry and especially of women’s writing. It is precisely this opposition that I seek to explore and unsettle in reading Dragomoshchenko’s poetics of correspondence in A Common Strangeness. While working in a very different mode from Dragomoshchenko––or, for that matter, Dmitri Prigov––Fanailova equally exemplifies how contemporary Russian poets are mapping the rich territory that lies between and beyond self-exposure and self-concealment.