Anna Aslanyan

London

Author, Writer and Editor at Freelance

Reading, translating, interpreting, reviewing @ random Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History out with @ProfileBooks

Articles

Radio Treason by Rebecca West

2 weeks ago | the-tls.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
Anna Aslanyan | Black Comedy

1 month ago | lrb.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer.
Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age

2 months ago | spectator.com.au | Anna Aslanyan

Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire Bloomsbury Continuum, pp.320, 20 When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region.
Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age

2 months ago | spectator.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low.
A triumphant new translation of a Romanesco dialect poet

2 months ago | the-tls.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan by Domenico Starnone

Jan 22, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
Anna Aslanyan | Bicycle Thieves

Dec 30, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of Hackney Downs. One evening a few years ago, walking across the park, a friend and I saw a woman lying on the path next to her bike. A group of youngsters jumped out of nowhere, she told us, knocked her off and ran away.
The Tales of Hoffmann (Royal Opera House, London)

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Paul Griffiths |Harrison Stetler |Anna Aslanyan |Amber Massie-Blomfield

Fantasy, folly and frolic: those tutelary deities of Offenbach’s operettas did not quit the scene when he turned to the heavier material of The Tales of Hoffmann. They stuck around to oversee atmospheres of irony and unlikelihood, as well as the occasional romping tune. Productions tend to make physical room for all these in the background, in crazy sets and choral shenanigans.
Building without End

Nov 12, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan

‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street … Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington’s brewery.
The Fear of 13 (Donmar Warehouse, London)

Oct 30, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Anna Aslanyan |Amber Massie-Blomfield |Toby Lichtig |John Stokes

“Based on a true story” has become a fashionable tag to attach to any work of art. Some stories are, naturally, more interesting than others. In 1981 Nick Yarris, aged twenty, got into a fracas with a Pennsylvanian policeman. He was arrested, charged with a murder he hadn’t committed, found guilty and sentenced to death. Several attempts to overturn the conviction were thwarted by bad luck. All hope lost, Yarris wrote to the authorities asking to be executed.