Conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky and Maria Stepanova

Poetry of Unsettlement

Maria Stepanova invites poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky to explore displacement as a central experience of our time. Together they explore poetry as a possible refuge from unsettlement, as a language beyond cultural and linguistic borders.

Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and emigrating to the United States at just eleven years old, Eugene Ostashevsky grew up between languages and cultures. From this journey a body of poetry has emerged, marked by wordplay and multilingualism, seeking to reveal the fragility of language and the moral assumptions hidden in every statement, every question, every word. Unsettlement and movement, inevitably, have shaped his poetry and the concerns that drive it. What happens when multilingualism becomes the cornerstone of writing? Does having to leave a place change how, to whom, and on whose behalf, we speak? Do diversity and movement push the poet toward translatability or opacity?

Maria Stepanova, current Resident CCCB, discusses with poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky about poetry as a key language for thought: as a space for displacement, open to multiplicity and new forms of imagination.