Dialogue of Cultures

Last week, a conference titled "Dialogue of Cultures" took place at KIPU, my host institution.

I was informed about the conference the day before it started and then eagerly included in the proceedings. It was all very sudden.

Maya, a young teacher in the English department, offered to translate my talk (which I literally threw together in one hour) into Russian and read it for me on the panel. Good practice, she said. I tried to weed out jargon, but she still had a tough job. There's no easy way around post-colonial language. 

The episode was chaotic from frenzied start to finish: on the morning of the conference, I was shuffled between three lunches, encouraged to drink wine copiously, photographed, and then hastily introduced as a last minute addition to a (mostly Russian) literature panel, of all things.

My talk - which was basically my dissertation prospectus distilled - was not received very well. If I had to judge solely by the two women sitting in the front row who kept smacking their foreheads and sneering, I would say that it was received very poorly, in fact. Unfortunately everyone blamed this on Maya's translation (which was actually pretty close) and exempted the author, the Amerikanka, from any culpability, even though I interrupted whenever the translation seemed imprecise, encouraged questions (I was denied), and mentioned to anyone who would listen that it was not the (Crimean Tatar) translator's conspiracy to make me seem critical of Soviet, Russian, or other dominant group's nationalist agendas. I am critical.

I felt stupid for not thinking better about who my audience was going to be - and more awful that Maya unfairly bore the brunt of their attacks. In the end, I thanked my victimized translator for her work and apologized for the misunderstanding. Then I listened to my No. 1 heckler give a paper on the mystery of acronyms borrowed from English and adopted into Russian ("we say SMS - but what does it mean? ATM - does anybody know?"), and then I vowed to be more vapid next time. Or learn post-colonial theory in Russian so I can say it all myself.

Dialogue of Cultures.

If you're looking for a strange way to spend 16 or 17 minutes, my friend Max Fass recently posted video footage from a 2005 trip that we took to Космач in the Carpathians, in which we literally collided with a Hutsul wedding party (first scene) and then spent the next day following around the musicians, crashing the wedding. This coming weekend, Kosmach - a village that was at the end of a long squiggly line on my roadmap of Ukraine in 2005 - is hosting its second annual international music festival. For the times, they are a-changin'. 

Albeit in fits and starts.