Delirium and Displacement: Contemporary Spanish- and Russian-language Poetry Beyond Imperial Centers
When a colonial power withdraws from its colonies, it leaves behind a contradictory cultural legacy. As the inhabitants of former colonies build a new culture, the influences of the colonizer—language, literature, mythology—reveal themselves as problematic, yet often practical. These elements are recycled in unexpected ways.
The Spanish Empire relinquished its territories in the Americas in the 19th century, whereas Ukraine and the countries of the Baltics, Central Asia, and the Caucasus declared independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Despite the temporal gap, both linguistic regions have undergone parallel identity upheavals, which in turn enabled the emergence of distinctive language use and literature. Delirium, excess, and creolization are characteristic of this process.
Since 2022, Hamdam Zakirov, Polina Kopylova, and Jose Luis Rico have collaborated on these phenomena, particularly in editing the multilingual contemporary poetry anthology Saaristo (sivuvalo.com/antologia). At the Runokuu event, Zakirov, Kopylova, and Rico will read Finnish translations of poems that best reflect the aforementioned contradictions and phenomena. The poets and cultural figures will discuss the differences and parallels in the development of poetry in Spanish- and Russian-speaking regions outside of Spain and Russia.
Language: Finnish (poems in Spanish and Russian + Finnish translations)
In collaboration with: Sivuvalo platform
