Event Highlights: Slavic Voices – An Evening of Poetry and Music with Sylva Fischerova, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Vera Pavlova
On Wednesday, October 15, the Center for the Study of Europe hosted “Slavic Voices,” featuring Czech poet Sylva Fischerová, Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Russian poet Vera Pavlova. Sylva, one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation and teacher of classics at Charles University in Prague, read from Stomach of the Soul, her newest collection of poems, translated by the author with Stuart Friebert and Andrew Hauner and published this year by Calypso Editions. Dzvinia, who teaches poetry at Pine Manor College and at Providence College, read from her fifth and most recent collection, Silvertone. Lastly, Vera Pavlova, author of fifteen collections of poetry in Russian, read a series of miniature poems from If There Is Something to Desire. Pavlova read her poems in Russian and Olga Livshin, Head of BU’s Russian Language Program, read the English translations by Pavlova’s late husband Steven Seymour. The readings were interspersed with live music by Russian soprano Maria Lyudko, Russian pianist and music scholar Ludmilla Leibman, and classical guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan. A reception and book-signing followed the event, which was co-sponsored by the 2014 Poetry Series, the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, the literary journal AGNI, and the Educational Bridge Project.
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