Ilya Danishevsky. Photo by Arkady Kazantsev, 2020.
Alex Karsavin.
The Russian cover of Mannelig in Chains (Published by Poryadok slov, 2018).
Ilya Danishevsky, Mannelig in Chains
As of June 2020, Alex Karsavin and I are thrilled to announce that our translation in progress of Ilya Danishevsky’s 2018 novel Mannelig in Chains (Маннелиг в цепях) is being funded in part by the RusTrans Publish project! Please read more about the project, created by Drs. Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer, and about the other 11 translation projects on the RusTrans website here.
Ilya Danishevsky is already described in brief elsewhere on my website, here.
I am very lucky to have the opportunity to work with someone as attuned to nuance, context, and sound as my Mannelig co-translator Alex Karsavin. Alex’s description of Mannelig is as smart and beautiful as the novel itself:
“Mannelig in Chains has been hailed by critics as a foundational text of queer modernism in the former Soviet Union, a movement that’s now coming of age. This emergent body of literature both centers queer narrators and formally reproduces the disorienting nature of their experience. … Fluid identity, the unstable nature of private and public spheres, the sensory overload of war turned spectacle—in Mannelig, all are reflected within a narrative strategy designed to induce vertigo. Frequent usage of nested, cascading clauses shuttle the reader between pasts and presents that grow increasingly entangled. Equal parts telegraphic and elliptical, Mannelig merges the phantasmagorical personal with the stuff of byt.”
Alex Karsavin and I are actively seeking a publisher for our English translation of Mannelig in Chains. The author Ilya Danishevsky is the rights-holder to the Russian original. Please contact me at anne DOT o DOT fisher AT gmail DOT com if you are interested in discussing publication!