To close out Season 2, we spoke with three translators—Sasha Karsavina, Philippa Mullins, and Nadezhda Vikulina—about their collaborative translation of Girls and Institutions (excerpt in n+1, 2024), Russian writer and activist Daria Serenko’s polyphonic portrait of girls under late-state bureaucracy. From tangled pronouns to shifting registers, the trio walks us through their methods of translating a text where everyday office work gives way to flashes of levity and transcendence. Somewhere between the poetic and the prosaic, every sentence becomes a site of collective negotiation and female solidarity.
