You are invited to the final talk of the semester organized by the Department of Translation and Interpretation.
Speaker : Zachary King, Bilkent University
Title : James Lloydovich Patterson: Race, Internationalism, and Translating an Afro-
Americo-Soviet into American
Date : 06 May 2026, Wednesday
Time : 12.30-13.20
Venue : FF-B 05
Abstract: This talk presents ongoing work on translating Soviet poet James Lloydovich Patterson (1933-2025). Patterson, the son of an African-American set designer who emigrated to the Soviet Union and a Ukrainian painter, was born in Moscow and was a child star in the classic Soviet film Circus (1936). After a successful start of a career in the Soviet Navy, Patterson decided to become a poet, publishing several works of poetry, autobiography and prose from the late 1960s until he emigrated following the collapse of the USSR to the US, where he died one year ago this May. Though Patterson was not famous or popular, Russian/Soviet studies, as well as comparative literary studies, can benefit from deeper scholarly engagement and translation of his work. Most obviously, the Black Lives Matter movement has led many disciplines to reconsider how the place of African-descended people has been written out of Western canons, histories and theories and how the actual diversity of cultural history can be recaptured, and to make disciplines like Slavic studies more diverse in the make-up of our own scholarly community. On the other hand, Patterson’s writing and work, frequently addressing issues in not only Soviet, but also American, African-American and contemporary African themes and figures, clearly connects to recent work on the idea of Soviet and communist international literature. Still, how is one to read, and importantly, translate the work of an author biographically and intellectually deeply Soviet for an English-speaking audience, with very different expectations about how literature from a racially marked author engages with the literary tradition? This talk will try to situate a reading of Patterson between writers like Pushkin and Mayakovsky, with whom Patterson clearly saw himself in dialogue, the African-Americans of the Harlem Renaissance with whom his work might be compared in an American context, and a writer like Nazım Hikmet, whose contemporaneous late poetry, also written in Moscow, similarly explores themes of internationalism through a subdued mode of “civic poetry.”
Bio: Zachary Murphy King received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023, specializing in literature, aesthetic theory and translation in the Soviet Union and its engagements with modernism. His research focuses on the reception of Western modernism in early Soviet culture, exploring the role of translation and reception in shaping socialist realism. He is also an active translator of poetry, literary and academic writing, working with texts from Russian, German and Polish, and a recipient of the Compass Translation Award for Russian Poetry and grants from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, among others. Dr. King’s current book project investigates Soviet debates over authors Marcel Proust, John Dos Passos and James Joyce and their broader implications for literary theory and social politics.