Bilingual Muse

Adrian Wanner is the Liberal Arts Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He is the author of Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, both published by Northwestern University Press.

• Introduction: “The Trick of Doubling Oneself”1. Elizaveta Kul’man: The Most Polyglot of Russian Poets2. Wassily Kandinsky’s Trilingual Poetry3. Marina Tsvetaeva’s Self-Translation into French4. Vladimir Nabokov’s Dilemma of Self-Translation5. Joseph Brodsky in English6. Self-Translation among Contemporary Russian-American PoetsConclusionNotesBibliography

“The Bilingual Muse confirms Adrian Wanner as the leading scholar of Russian literary translingualism. His scintillating study of self-translation by seven disparate poets is attentive to the nuances of prosody as well as issues of cultural and personal identity. Especially luminescent are Wanner’s discussion of the short-lived polyglot prodigy Elizaveta Kul’man, his recuperation of the painter Wassily Kandinsky as a formidable trilingual poet, and his account of why Vladimir Nabokov regarded autotranslation as ‘self-torture.” - Steven G. Kellman, author of The Translingual Imagination“The Bilingual Muse is illuminating and useful. It is rare and unusual to see the kind of thorough treatment of all levels of language and prosody that Wanner provides.” - Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, author of Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration