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1913issue6online

57 Baltic Sea, Kaliningrad, where Igor Belov lives, from that of Viktor Ivaniv’s hometown, the Siberian metropolis Novosibirsk. And both are rather incomparable to the cultural context of Moscow—a world city on a par with New York, Paris and Tokyo and also the home of Kseniia Shcherbino and Feodor Swarovski. Yet paradoxically, in a manner precisely opposed to the remarks in the paragraph above, the most important shortcoming of the term “post-socialist” is that it draws distinctions too insistently—between the present experience of the territories of the old “west” and that of its former cold-war ideological opponents. The fact of the matter is that we are all now part of a single, global, political, economic and cultural reality. Beneath all of the real and important distinctions that separate Philadelphia from Moscow, which are just as significant as those that distinguish Riga from Novosibirsk, a basic commonality of cultural and social conditions unites all of these locations, East, West and in-between. How may we describe these common conditions? Without delving too deeply: post-industrial capitalism, mass media and modern financial “instruments,” the internet, and the attendant cultural and political effects of these global phenomena— including our internet-enabled translation project itself. Just glance at the basic similarity of the OWS and Russian political protest movements of fall, 2011—also both enabled by new communications technologies—and you get the idea. In light of these fundamental conditions that unite us all, we propose that the poets and translators presented here are all part of a single, global tribe of the poetic word, that is called on to create more humane and truer network of communication across the globe as a minor, yet hopeful alternative to the economic and political institutions that dominate us all. -Kevin Platt

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