(Prokopyev Alexey Petrovich)
I was born in 1957 in Cheboksary. I studied art history at Moscow State University, but realized early on that my primary artistic medium would be language—my own and others, heard and translated. I lived and worked in Moscow; since 2022, in Berlin.
The author of four books of poetry—from "The Night Watchman" through "One Day" and "Snowy Troy" to "The Metaphysics of Clothing." The fifth book, "Fragments of the Future," was written along a fault line—between cities, languages, and voices.
I translate poetry from Chuvash, English, German, Swedish, Danish, and Italian. Among the authors I love (and I only translate my favorites) are Hölderlin and Novalis, Nietzsche and Rilke, Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, Georg Heim, Paul Celan, Herta Müller, Tomas Tranströmer, Inger Christensen, and others. For me, translation is not a foreign-language rendering of poetry, but a continuation of the original's life in Russian and within its cultural context.
I've received several special awards for translation, including the Andrei Bely Prize, the Poetry Prize, and the Master Prize. In 2025, I received an Arbeitsstipendium from the Berlin Senate to complete my book "Fragments of the Future." I plan to present it at the festival.
Since 2006, he has been the initiator and curator of the Cheboksary Festival of Contemporary Poetry "VoiceA," created in memory of Gennady Aigi. Since 2023, it has existed as an online space for live readings and the exchange of voices.
I'm currently working on a complete corpus of Paul Celan's poems. At the festival, I'll present the complete collection of Georg Trakl's poems, translated and annotated by myself.
Cheboksary - Moscow - Berlin.