Marina Skalova, Finding the mist of paradise

With Trouer la brume du paradis, Marina Skalova continues her extensive project, initiated in 2019 following a three-month residency in Moscow under the patronage of Pro Helvetia.

Trouer la brume du paradis
is a translation of a collection of poems by Yanka Diaghileva, a comet who briefly shone on the punk scene of the Soviet Union in the late ’80s.

Yanka Diaghileva’s songs and poems, written in an abrute language that conjures up strange images imbued with folkloric and mythological elements, tell the story of an existence shaped by urgency and precariousness, but also by the need not to bow to the demands of a dying dictatorial state.

Trouer la brume du Paradis is part of a vast cycle of translations undertaken by Russian-born poet and translator Marina Skalova. It focuses on “the place of women in Soviet Russia”, through the works of women poets.

In so doing, she reconstructs a genealogy of her own writing, recalling its roots in a radical, anarchist Russian literary tradition that has always refused to give in to any form of oppression.

Marina Skalova (Moscow, 1988) writes poetry, theater and UFOs that explore the black holes between literary genres. She is also a literary translator from Russian and German.

Author, she has published Atemnot / Souffle court, (Cheyne, 2016) reissued by Héros-Limite in 2023; Exploration du flux (Seuil, Fiction & Cie, 2018); La chute des comètes et des cosmonautes (théâtre, L’Arche, 2019), which she translates into German with Frank Weigand.

This autumn sees the publication of her translations of Tu es l’avenir (Vanloo editions), a collection of poems by Galina Rymbu, a major Russian poet living in Ukraine, and Verdicts by Lida Youssoupova (Zoème editions), a book of documentary poems based on Russian court reports. She is currently translating all of Yanka Diaghileva’s poems and songs for Editions Zoème.