Lostlingual by Dinara Rasuleva is the first volume of the sdvig series, dedicated to translingual avant-garde writing. In this volume, Rasuleva, a Berlin-based poet, returns to Tatar, the language of her childhood. She had used it only rarely as an adult, and never before as a creative writer–the national language of her people, smothered by Russian colonialism. She sets herself the goal of composing poetry in Tatar as she remembers it, without consulting dictionaries and grammars. The result is a collection of fragile and liberatory translingual poems, in which Tatar, English, German, and Russian call out, respond to, and transform one another.

With Rasuleva’s introduction and Ostashevsky’s afterword, Lostlingual also explores the social and conceptual perspectives of translingual poetry.

Sdvig: translingual avant-gardes is edited by poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky. Sdvig, a term used by the historical avant-garde in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union to describe distortion and fracture of communication norms, derives from the verb sdvinut’: to cause something to move, usually from one place to another. On the verbal plane, the most common variety of sdvig is the pun, which estranges language by foregrounding materiality, obfuscating reference, and multiplying meanings.

Dinara Rasuleva (born 1987) is a Tatar poet and writer based in Berlin. She writes translingual poetry and prose in Russian, Tatar, English, and German. Since 2020, she has been running a fem-writing workshop-laboratory for immigrant women, Napishi, and since 2022, a workshop on writing in the native forgotten language, TEL:L.

Edited and translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. Illustrated.

Динара Расулева