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Articles

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2025): July 2025

Pereleshin’s Queer Self-Translation

Submitted
14 April 2025
Published
2025-07-16

Abstract

Valerii Pereleshin has been considered an anomaly in Russophone letters: a gay Russian émigré poet, he lived half his life in Rio de Janeiro, writing poetry that he then self-published, dabbling in Portuguese in the 1980s. He had a carefully cultivated readership among the Russian diaspora scattered worldwide after the Bolshevik revolution, a readership that he mostly lost after he finally came out in print with his 1976 collection of poems, Ariel. Its rejection coincided with some significant developments in Pereleshin’s life: a new friendship with Winston Leyland, a leading publisher of gay male literature in the United States, and a chance meeting with young Brazilian man, Humberto Passos, who became one of Pereleshin’s great loves and encouraged a new passion for writing in Portuguese. All while the gay rights movement in Brazil under a disintegrating military dictatorship that offered an opening for Pereleshin’s increasingly public gay writings in both languages. It is an accepted narrative that Pereleshin never engaged with a broader gay literary establishment. This article undermines that narrative by tracing Pereleshin’s burgeoning queer sensibility through an analysis of his “To the Green Eyed Boy,” a unpublished poem originally written in Russian, then later rewritten by Pereleshin in Portuguese so it could be yet further translated into English and finally published by Leyland. Pereleshin’s journey between Russian and Portuguese raises questions of self-translation and how queerness is encoded in new originals and new languages, cementing Pereleshin’s place as one of the most important gay writers of the past century.