Join us for a staged reading of “My Hell,” a contemporary Ukrainian drama by Oksana Savchenko making its English-language premiere. This semester, students passionate about theater had a unique opportunity to work with translator Hanna Leliv and director Neil Blackadder, both former Translators in Residence, and witness firsthand the process of translating a play and bringing it onto stage. The staged reading marks the culmination of a series of rehearsals where all participants of this creative collaboration developed and fine-tuned the translation through a director-led workshop process. This involved different students playing the same role in different scenes, and even performing the same scenes with different actors—and different lines. Attendees will get a glimpse into this behind-the-scenes process and ask questions during a post-performance Q&A with the actors, director, and translator.
Content advisory: The play includes references to suicide, eating disorders, and war crimes.
Presented by the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications and cosponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Join the Event
The staged reading is free and open to the public. Registration suggested; register through MyPrincetonU
Directions
Get directions to the Godfrey Kerr Studio, located on the second floor of the Wallace Dance building, Lewis Arts complex.
Accessibility
The Godfrey Kerr Studio is an accessible venue. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.
About the Artists
Hanna Leliv is a native of Lviv, Ukraine, where she works as a freelance translator and runs literary translation workshops at Ukrainian Catholic University. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation Workshop and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature into English have appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Washington Square Review, Circumference, and elsewhere. In 2022, Astra House published Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh in her translation. She has most recently served as a faculty fellow at the Dartmouth College the Leslie Center for the Humanities.
Neil Blackadder is a German to English translator and the author of “Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience.” In 2011, Blackadder was awarded a fellowship from the Howard Foundation (Brown University) and a PEN Translation Fund Grant to translate plays by Lukas Bärfuss. He has twice held residencies at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and Writers Omi at Ledig House. His work has often been supported by the Goethe-Institut, as well as by the Consulate General of Switzerland and the Austrian Cultural Forum. Blackadder has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton, and was a professor of theater at Duke University and Knox College.