Poetry recital: Nadezhda Voinova poems presentation from “White Blight”
collection by Athena Farrokhzad

White Blight (Translated from the Swedish by Nadezhda Voinova)

White Blight (2013) is a debut of Athena Farrokhzad, most renowned Swedish poet ranked by Focus magazine. This is a polylogue told by migrant family members about the experience of war, violence, and language entry into a foreign culture. Their speech includes new aphorisms, where Marxist terms, ordinary phrases, quotes by European authors, and philosophical reflections on the language come together:
My brother said: We are just the sum of the pain that the language has caused us / Sum of the pain that we have caused...

White Blight has been repeatedly adapted for stage and translated into English, Danish, Norwegian, Romanian, Hungarian, Belarusian and Croatian.

About author:
Athena Farrokhzad is one of the brightest contemporary Swedish female poets. Born in 1983 in Tehran, she grew up in Gothenburg. In 2013, she debuted her book Vitsvit (White Blight). Athena is the author of several books, editor of a collection of queer poetry, playwright, literary critic of the Aftonbladet newspaper, and translator (translated texts by Svetlana Kirsten, Marguerite Duras, and Adrienne Rich into Swedish). She is a winner of seven literary awards, including the Karin Boye Award (2013). She lives in Stockholm and teaches poetry at the Biskops Arnö Folkhögskola (folk high school).

About translator:
Nadezhda Voinova was born in 1974 in St. Petersburg. Graduated from the Art History Department of the Academy of Arts. She worked as an art critic and journalist in New World of Art, Dog.ru, Terra incognita and other publications. She was active in exhibition projects as a curator and author of projects in a close collaboration with many galleries and museums of St. Petersburg. Working on exhibition projects she lived in Vienna and Stockholm. She wrote several articles about Swedish Art and Photography. In Stockholm, she set up Vostok Art Gallery, where she held exhibitions of Slavka Velichkova, Andrey Rudyev, Ekaterina Sisfontes and Richard Foreus. She translated into Russian and published for the first time such renowned books as A Mölna-Elegy by Gunnar Ekelöf (Ad Marginem, 2016), The Machine Girl's Testament by Ida Linde (Argo-Risk, 2017), Selected Works, translation book by Gunnar Ekelöf (in collaboration with A. Prokopiev and N. Press; Poryadok Slov, 2018), Morse Songs, bilingual book by Malte Persson (M.: LitGOST, 2019). She translated many contemporary Swedish poets including Ann Jäderlund, Bruno K. Öijer, Khashayar Naderehvandi, Ida Börjel, Anna Axfors, Maxim Grigoriev, as well as many children’s books and songs. She has been published in magazines and internet projects such as Vozdukh, Prosodia, TextOnly. She is an author of articles, papers and lectures by Gunnar Ekelöf.