Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979, and cur- rently lives in Berlin. He writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and foreign words. His latest book of poetry, “The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi”, published by the New York Review of Books, contemplates communication challenges faced by pirates and parrots. For the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, The Pirate “transforms the absurdity of Russian Futurism into a postmodern poetics of immigration, as it mixes puns, jokes, specialist jargon, early modern exploration and colonial narratives, Socratic dialogue, Wittgensteinian language games, and the allegorical fable.” His previous book of poetry, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages. As translator, Ostashevsky works mainly from Russian into English, and specializes in OBERIU, the 1920s-30s Leningrad avant-garde group led by Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, as well as in Rus- sian and international Futurism. He has had his librettos for the composer Lucia Ronchetti performed in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. His prizes include the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm prize, the ALTA National Translation Award, and others.

THE PIRATE WHO DOES NOT KNOW THE VALUE OF PI

The pirate sails the Spanish Main
His ship describes a Markov chain
He stands at the bow and imbibes champagne
He takes in the tingling air
The parrot squints from a migraine
and would rather be elsewhere
I often think about the relationship of experience to language, says the Pirate Who Does Not Know The Value of Pi
All these things happen to us and we can’t always match
them with words:
How does that make them different?
Am I asking for something that, like, scire nefas, Leuconoe,
or can one maintain a position on the divergence between
the verbal and the nonverbal?
With us, for instance, since you are so much more verbal than I, is your experience of this sea essentially other than mine?— and I mean “essentially,”—
Furthermore, can I in any way understand an experience that
is other than mine, an experience that is authentically
your experience, or rather my experience, but with the pronoun referring to somebody other than me?