We are back with faculty interviews, and this time around, we have a special guest from the languages department.
Hello! For the readers, who are you, what do you teach here at Swarthmore, and what is your area of expertise?
I’m Sibelan Forrester; I teach Russian language and literature and some related topics: Russian Fairy Tales, with a fair amount of Folklore history and theory; a Translation Workshop for students who have proficiency in any language; a First-Year Seminar on East European Literature in translation. My expertise includes poetry and poetics, South Slavic lit and culture (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian), and translation theory and practice.
What classes are you teaching this semester, and what classes are your favorite to teach (and why?)
This fall I’m teaching first-year Russian language and the Translation Workshop I mentioned above—which is my favorite class to teach, though I also really like a First-Year Seminar I often teach on Love and Sex in Russian Literature and Culture.
When did you start learning Russian, and when/why did you decide to teach it?
Ah, I was going to take Arabic when I got to college, on the recommendation of my high school French teacher who was from Morocco, but the guy was on sabbatical, so I signed up for Russian, the next most “exotic” thing available. I loved graduate school, and the way to keep getting to do that kind of work was to become a college professor.
What is a project that a student has done recently that you thought was really interesting?
Over this past summer, one of our students worked with a small archive of documents from the USSR; he read and transcribed the handwriting and then translated everything. Now he’s working on a thesis that extracts the most interesting information from that archive and puts it into historical context. For example, the main character is left in a “children’s home” as a young child and spends a lot of time in the hospital, then later in life receives trips to a Soviet spa to treat her tuberculosis. Her neighbor’s daughter is handed over into her custody when the neighbor herself is arrested, signs the document from inside one of the notorious Moscow prisons, and then disappears into the Gulag.
I would imagine that the teaching of Russian has changed a lot since you learned, especially with recent political events. How-if at all-have the classroom and your mindset changed with regard to teaching?
Russian grammar is too unlike that of English to assume that students will just pick it up from speaking; we still have to explain a lot of stuff, draw tables on the board, but there’s more conversation in class than there used to be “back in the day.” Of course the invasion of Ukraine has not stimulated students’ desire to study Russian language, though I hear that classes in History and Political Science (here and elsewhere) are doing well. It’s important to note that Russian is spoken in many places besides the Russian Federation, in fact is still the lingua franca of Central Asia. To be honest, almost everyone I know from the Russian Federation has moved abroad to Armenia, Georgia, Germany, the UK….
What’s a book that you think everyone should read, and one you think not enough people know about?
Everyone should read Stanisław Lem’s CYBERIAD!—which is very funny but also darkly philosophical. I’m also a big fan of Goce Smilevski’s book FREUD’S SISTERS, translated from Macedonian.
What are your plans for the near future, academic or otherwise?
I’m co-editing a collection of articles about the ways the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) preserved their languages and identities through the Soviet years with culture: literature, theater, even fashion. And I’m looking forward to heating up my sauna as the temperature outside gets chillier.
Thank you so much!
Sibelan Forrester is a Professor, as well as a prolific translator and poet, and has excellent taste in which books she makes her Eastern European literature students read.
