Guest lecture – Alexandr Averbuch: "The Poetics of Palimpsest and Cultural Memory in Gali-Dana Singer’s Verse"

This talk will investigate the multilayered and hypertextual qualities of the poetry of Gali-Dana Singer, a contemporary Russian-Israeli poet, translator, and editor. I will discuss Singer’s allusions to and appropriations of poetic traditions of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries – on the formal level, through the graphic representations of her poems; on the content level, via allusions to and quotations from such authors as Simeon Polotsky, Vasilii Kapnist, and Fedor Tiutchev; and on the acoustic level, through rhythmic and phonetic imitations. The presentation will disclose how the aesthetics and ideas characteristic of baroque writing, eighteenth-century sentimentalism, and the nineteenth-century romantic sublime are amalgamated in Singer’s poetry to effect a process of cultural transmission. I will analyse this influence from three standpoints: as an intentional manifestation of poetic memory; a deliberate choice that goes beyond stylization to constitute a discourse on recollection and recognition; and a method of lyric self-positioning in relation to her contemporaries. 

Alexandr Averbuch, a native of Novoaidar, Luhans’k region, Ukraine (b. 1985), is a bilingual (Ukrainian/Russian) poet, translator, and literary scholar. His poetry, both original and translated, has been published in various literary journals and anthologies. He is the author of two books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, and English. He has organized numerous poetic performances and festivals (most recently, the International Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry, summer 2020). His poetry deals with the issues of ethnic fragmentation and in-betweenness, multiple identities, queerness, cross- and multilingualism, documentalist writing, and memory.