Elena Kostioukovitch at the Latvian Book Fair, February 28 - March 2, 2013

latvian book fair 2013

At the 2013 Latvian Book Fair Elena Kostioukovitch will present the Latvian edition of her award-winning  WHY ITALIANS LOVE TO TALK ABOUT FOOD released in Latvia as Kāpēc itāļiem patīk runāt par ēdienu by SIA "Jānis Roze" on March 2nd, 2013, at 13.00 in the Kipsala International Centre of Riga (Hall BT1).

Elena´s other public appearances include: 

- on Thursday, February 28, at 18:15 - Faculty of Modern Languages of Latvian University (Visvalza 4 a) - Meeting with students of translation studies

- on Friday, March 1, at 12:30 - Faculty of Modern Languages of Latvian University (Visvalza 4 a) -Meeting with students of English Language and Literature and others

- on Friday, March 1, at 18:00 - Birojnīca Berga Bazārs - Meeting with readers

- on Saturday, March 2, at 18:30 - Literary cafe Polaris, Shopping mall Domina - Meeting with readers


http://showtime.delfi.lv/news/culturepark/local/v-rigu-priedet-pisatelnica-elena-kostyukovich.d?id=43061036

 

В Ригу приедет писательница Елена Костюкович

Publicitātes foto
Foto: Publicitātes foto

Для участия в "Латвийской книжной выставке 2013", встречи с читателями и презентации вышедшей на латышском языке книги "Почему итальянцам нравится говорить о еде", с 28 февраля до 2 марта в Риге будет гостить популярная писательница, переводчик и литературный агент Елена Костюкович.

Встреча с Костюкович пройдет 2 марта в 13.00 в Международном выставочном центре на Кипсале на стенде Латвийской гильдии книжников.

Родившая в Киеве писательница, постоянно живущая в Италии, широко известна русской читательской аудитории великолепными переводами произведений Умберто Эко. Ее книга "Почему итальянцам нравится говорить о еде" (на русском языке книга вышла под названием "Еда. Итальянское счастье" и переведена на итальянский, английский, польский и эстонский языки) приглашает читателя в увлекательное гастрономическое путешествие по Апеннинскому полуострову в обществе классиков итальянской литературы, великих художников и поваров. В конце 2012 года в переводе Даце Мейере книга издана на латышском языке издательством Jāņa Rozes apgāds.

Елена Костюкович преподает в Италии русскую литературу, редактирует переводы российских писателей на итальянский язык, читает лекции на широкий круг тем: русская и итальянская культура, теория и практика перевода, творчество Умберто Эко и др.

Среди ее друзей Умберто Эко, Борис Акунин, Людмила Улицкая и другие известные итальянские и русские литераторы. Е.Костюкович много путешествует, активно публикуется в российских журналах, выступает с лекциями, ведет мастер-классы перевода. В 2009 году она организовала визит Умберто Эко в Тартуский университет.

Featured titles

  • Ceylon, a novel by Yuri Buida (2015)

    Rights sold:  Russia - EKSMO

    Longlisted for the 2016 NOS literary award
    Longlisted for the 2016 Big Book literary award

    Yuri Buida's Ceylon is a family chronicle narrated in first person by Andrei Cherepnin, the last living representative of his family. Generation after generation, Cherepnins played a significant role in the life of a small provincial town Osorin; their private lives became integral part of its history, of the history of Russia. They were among the founders of the city, they have grown up and developed with it, they actively participated to the first industrial revolution, then to WWI and the Bolshevik revolution, the family was torn apart by the Russian Civil War, it survived the WWII, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Perestroika, and faced up with a new reality of modern Russia.

    Family history of Cherepnins - just as the history of Russia - features an endless line of secrets, betrayals, deaths, and recompenses for their sins: narrator's great-grandfather, a prominent revolutionary, once executed his own brother, who was a counter-revolutionary. Narrator's grandfather, a director of the military plant, killed a murderer of his granddaughter. Life Andrei is also overfilled with losses and deaths of his most loved ones.

    Ceylon is a parable novel, a tale of a broken reality, of the world nearing its end, but still aching for the impossible ideal, for the City of Sun. In Buida's vision, the Cherpnins are the metaphoric depiction of Russia. Their deliberate or intuitive intents to put together their broken lives only lead them to a new tragedy. The only thing that remains intact, and gives them strength to continue is their permanent longing for love and their native ability to share love with others.

    (From the review published by Lizok's Bookshelf blog):

    I might not call Yuri Buida's Цейлон (Ceylon) the author's headiest or most metaphysical novel—I definitely prefer both his Blue Blood and Zero Train—but Ceylon, like Poison and Honey, his previous book, is thoroughly readable and enjoyable. Lots of Ceylon felt familiar after reading several other Buida novels: part of my enjoyment, I suspect, came from just that because I love observing how authors reuse structures and tropes in various books. That familiarity may also help explain why I think Ceylon feels more accessible and mainstream (these aren't bad words!) to me than, say, his Blue Blood or Zero Train...

     

    As with Blue Blood and Poison and Honey, a family home feels like a key character in Ceylon: in this case, as in Poison, there's a house on a hill. The area it's in is known as "Ceylon," which reminds of how a building in Blue Blood is known as "Africa." Both those names are introduced early in their respective novels, leading to questions about the origins of the building names. In the case of Ceylon, named thusly by a traveler in the eighteenth century enamored of the island, there were early attempts to dress up dogs as tigers, boys as monkeys, and wooden structures as palm trees. Not quite a tropical paradise but an attempt at paradise nevertheless and (long story short, since of course there's much more to things) the place, though not the original house, which burned, is now home to the Cherepin family, five generations of which are described in varying levels of detail in the book by Andrei Ilyich Cherepin, a first-person narrator who's genial and, though heavily involved in events, feels surprisingly reliable.

     

    Ceylon, though, feels almost more like some form of "absurd realism" or at least "quirky realism" to me, what with brothers on opposite sides at revolution time—this, by the way, feels like another case of attempts at paradise, of which there are many in Ceylon and Ceylon, including through marriage—and a taxidermied bear and unlikely loves and a woman dancing the lambada at the grave of her son, who died in Chechnya. There's lots of everyday oddity. And I nearly forgot the big elm tree growing through the house. A sort of family tree.

    There's a lot of history, too: Andrei's first job is at a dig, where he charms all the young women, he goes on to be a teacher, work at the local museum, and write his dissertation about local history that includes his family. Digs and cultural layers come up a lot in contemporary Russian fiction and Buida piles together Russian history, local history, and family history for the reader to dig through, working in the two brothers' conflicts about the revolution—I mention this again because I thought it's one of the strongest and best-integrated subplots in the book, with its combination of "big" history and family history—the military-industrial complex, whose secrets another family member keeps; the crime-ridden banditry of the nineties; the wars in Chechnya; and even the conflict in Ukraine. Some of these chunks of history are more successful than others, I think: as often happens in fiction, particularly family sagas that draw on and reflect a country's history, more distant events usually feel better contextualized and grounded than those more recent.

    In the end, though, the town cemetery, known as Red Mountain, felt almost more significant to me than Ceylon, both because Andrei speaks, early on, of his youthful hope for immortality and because his grandfather has taken on a gigantic cemetery renovation project (financed in a way that doesn't sound perfectly legal) that dovetails nicely with Andrei's thoughts about the afterlife at the end of the book, when he's the father of three (almost four) children and has described rather dramatic losses of family members. There's a lot of mortality in Ceylon but also lots of birth.

     

     

     

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  • Medea and her Children, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (1996)

    Moscow Penne Prize Winner 2000

    Rights sold:  Albania - OMSCA, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - KUN LUN, Denmark - GYLDENDAL, Estonia – TANAPAEV, Finland - SILTALA, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - VOLK UND WELT (LUCHTENHAND LUEBBE), Greece - OKEANIDA, Hungary - MAGVETO, Italy - EINAUDI, Israel - KETER BOOKS, Korea - GIMM-YOUNG, Latvia - JANIS ROZE, Lithuania - JOTEMA, The Netherlands - DE GEUS, Norway - BAZAR, Poland - PHILIP WILSON, Portugal - CAVALO DE FERRO, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - EKSMO, AST, Serbia - Filip Višnjić, Slovakia - KALLIGRAM, Turkey - AD KITAPCILIK, ITHAKI, USA - SCHOCKEN, World Arabic - DAR ALMADA

    Medea Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean village, the last remaining pureblooded Greek in a family that has lived on that coast for centuries. Looking like "a portrait Goya had omitted to paint" in the widow's black she has worn since the death of her husband, the childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family of nieces and nephews who, together with their spouses, children, and friends, gather each spring and summer at her home. Ageless and unflappable, Medea greets each successive wave of visitors with calm warmth and welcome, and observes with interest their romantic entanglements, disappointments, conflicts, and passions. These shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition intertwine with the dramatic saga of a family surviving the upheavals that characterized Soviet life in the twentieth century, as viewed through Medea's memories.

    "The story has a Tolstoyan heft to it, not only in its seriousness but in the dizzying array of characters who wander in and out." (Kirkus Review)

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