Subversive Verses

To paraphrase Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: Where is poetry more respected than a country where poets are killed for their verses? Of course, he was referring to the Soviet Union, but dictatorial regimes all over the world have held poets in similar deadly regard. In two sessions we will look at poems by writers who have been censored, exiled, imprisoned, or executed by regimes ranging from Stalin’s Russia to Pinochet’s Chile, Myanmar’s ruling junta or today’s Iran. What exactly are they afraid of?

November 20: The focus of the first session will be writers from the 1930s and ’40s, such as Daniil Kharms (USSR) and Zuzanna Ginczanka (Poland).

December 4: In the second session we will examine more recent works by poets such as Heberto Padilla (Cuba) and Liu Xia (China) and songwriters Victor Jara (Chile) and Shervin Hajipour (Iran). Our speaker, Philip Boehm, is an American playwright, literary translator, and theater director. He has translated into English more than 30 novels and plays by German and Polish writers and has received a number of translation awards as well as National Endowment of the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.