Tag Archives: Leyla Shukurova
Writing as Identity: Banine’s “Parisian Days,” Translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
At the start of her second memoir, “Parisian Days,” Banine, a French author of Azerbaijani descent, arrives in the promised land. The year is 1921. Paris has newly entered the Roaring Twenties, a time of short respite between the two Great Wars. Banine is only nineteen, and she has just miraculously escaped her detested husband, the distant city of Istanbul where she left him behind, her homeland Azerbaijan and, perhaps most significantly, the grips of the Soviet Union.
EAST AND WEST MEET IN BANINE’S “DAYS IN THE CAUCASUS,” translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
Banine came into the world in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1905. She grew up taking lessons in French, German, English, and Russian, participating in feasts marking the end of Ramadan, playing the piano, traveling between the city and the countryside with relatives, talking to poplars, talking to rivers. Daydreaming.