Parallel Letters
(Parallel’noe pis’mo)
Parallel Letters (Parallel’noe Pis’mo), a new bilingual collection of poems by Russian-American author, translator, and Boston College Professor Maxim D. Shrayer, showcases twin texts that were born from the same sources, but occupy different linguistic and cultural spaces: Russian and English.
The title of the collection—which Shrayer believes to be the first volume of verse by a Russian-American bilingual poet with parallel yet different versions of each text—was drawn from his “parallel writing” process: his principal method of creating literary texts over the past three years.
“It’s not self-translation, but rather a parallel creation of texts in two languages,” explained Shrayer, a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies. “Living as I do in the space of translingualism, I can no longer think of the ‘original’ and the ‘translation,’ but only of parallel versions of one text.”
According to Shrayer, who has authored and edited nearly 30 books in English and Russian, “there have been books with ‘bilingual texts,’ usually the original on the left side and the translation on the right. To my knowledge, this is the first with both versions—Russian and English, in my case—authored by the poet. In a sense, a parallel presentation of the two versions of my poems offers both a map of their creation and a guide to the workings of a translingual literary mind.”
The volume’s 38 poems—written from 2020–2024—primarily focus on immigrant memory among those from the former Soviet Union now living in the United States, Israel, and Europe; the Soviet legacy; and the wars in Ukraine and Israel. Poetry has been central to Shrayer’s work since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Released in April, Parallel Letters was launched that month at the Bebelplatz book fair in Berlin. The publisher, Sandermoen Publishing, based in Zug, Switzerland, describes the book as “a new word in literature.” Founded by Anna Chediya Sandermoen, a Swiss-based expatriate originally from the former USSR, the publishing house is an international leader in bilingual and multilingual publishing.
“Shrayer’s verses are marked by a passionate commitment to justice and by formal originality,” the publisher noted. “The poems reflect each other like two mirrors but also refract each other, as they are mirrors of history and culture. Each sprouting in its own linguistic soil, Shrayer’s poetic texts whisper reverently and tenderly about the divine creator and scream about human suffering. In them, pain and nostalgia neighbor happiness and love.”
What is new in the volume, according to Sandermoen, “is the way a bilingual text appears. It happens simultaneously in two languages, not through the process of self-translation from one language to another. And since every language exists in its own cultural universe and acts as a tuning chamber for culture, bilingual texts do not always mirror each other, but follow—each of them—their own logic, and also the author’s emotional ‘momentum,’ which exists in a particular place and time. In order to understand the book, to feel it, it is not enough to read just its Russian or its English ‘half,’ because they do not fully coincide with each other.”
This new approach has won praise from Shrayer’s scholarly and poetic peers.
“This is not only a collection of letters, it’s a voice of memory,” said Professor Emeritus Stefano Garzonio of Italy’s University of Pisa, a prominent bilingual poet, scholar, and literary translator. “The title refers not only to the letter itself but to writing—its style and the language that defines its nature. In different ways, writing in two languages is building and rebuilding two worlds. To write is to awaken memory, and memory is not just words, not just spirit, but also scent, taste, matter, flesh. The flesh that time itself transforms in the flow of life, carrying one’s own people, one’s own friends, one’s own lineage.
“The parallel letters that Maxim D. Shrayer sends to all of us are the words that build and rebuild both his own split world and our own multiple worlds. The former USSR, America, Israel, Russia, and Ukraine are the places from where the letters were sent to the poet, and where he now sends the letters back. Moscow, Leningrad, Jerusalem, Kamianets-Podilskyi, and Boston are the poet’s cities. The places experienced and now reconstructed through memory are Shrayer’s addresses. The father calls the son, the son answers his father in rhymed and free verse, in terza rima and couplets,” Garzonio added.
Fedor Poljakov, a University Professor at the University of Vienna and a leading historian of émigré letters, also lauded Parallel Letters: “Owing to its strong voice and ornate mosaic of images, the poetry of Maxim D. Shrayer sometimes makes one forget that it grows out of several literary traditions, to which the experience of the poet-observer, poet-traveler, and poet-researcher is applied. The poet is steeped in life’s history, and his poems reveal a depth of recollection. The bilingualism of Parallel’noe pis’mo/Parallel Letters underscores the multiple reflections of the worlds where the poet’s soul had found refuge and where his analytical talent had been formed.”
For more on Maxim D. Shrayer, visit shrayer.com