Alex Braslavsky

Alex Braslavsky earned her B.A. in English Literature and Russian Language and Culture from Columbia University in 2018. As an undergraduate, she began delving into Russian and French poetry and studied abroad in Moscow and Paris. She then went on to complete an M.Phil. degree in Slavonic Studies at Oxford, where she grew interested in metaphysical traditions of Russian poetry and started learning Polish. It was there that she began translating poetry.  

Alex began her doctoral studies at Harvard in 2020, where she has since been working in Czech, in addition to Russian and Polish. Her translations of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Polish-Jewish poet killed in the Holocaust at the age of twenty eight, were published with World Poetry Books in 2023. Her dissertation “The Evolution of the Aging Voice: Three Case Studies of Nonagenarian Women Poets in Slavic Canons” looks at the relationship between aging and poetics. 

Alex is interested in looking at the relationship between a poet’s experience of aging and inflection points in their body of work. She studies how a poet’s decision to “self-censor” may affect our reception of their oeuvre on an ontological level. Her research interests include Slavic and American poetic traditions, the poet’s hiatus, the poetics of silence (absence, abstinence, apophasis), metaphysical poetry, experimental poetics, feminist theory, age studies, and film.