Valery Pereleshin

Valery Pereleshin , pseudonym of Valery Frantsevich Salatko-Petrishche (Russian: Вале́рий Фра́нцевич Сала́тко-Петри́ще) (July 20, 1913 – November 7, 1992) was a Russian-Brazilian poet and translator.

Biography Pereleshin was born in Irkutsk, where his father served as an official of the Siberian railroads. From 1920 to 1939, he resided in Harbin, the railroad hub in Manchuria that grew into a veritable Russian emigrant city after the Russian Civil War. In Harbin, he studied law and learned the Chinese language. He became a monk in a Russian Orthodox monastery there in 1938 under the name German (Герман). In 1939, he moved to Beijing and began working for the Russian Orthodox mission in China. In 1943, he moved to Shanghai, where he worked as an interpreter for the Soviet press agency TASS. In 1950, his attempt to emigrate to the United States failed, as a result he was extradited to China. Subsequently, in 1952, he left for Brazil with his mother, where he learned Portuguese. He worked as a librarian at the British Council in Rio de Janeiro. In 1983, he moved to the suburb Jacarepaguá. He died in 1992.

Pereleshin was absent from Brazil four times: in 1973, he visited France and Belgium; in 1974, he participated in a poetry festival in Texas; in 1986, he was invited to the Netherlands by the Leiden University; and in 1989, he participated in the Poetry International festival in Rotterdam. Through his contact with the Dutch slavist Jan Paul Hinrichs, Pereleshin donated part of his archive to the Leiden University Library, including his the numerous letters sent from Beijing and Shanghai to his mother, who stayed behind in Harbin. Another part of his archive is at the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Career During his lifetime, Pereleshin published thirteen books of poetry and an autobiography in verse. Apart from that, he translated Chinese and Brazilian poetry. He is considered as a master of the sonnet. Besides, he is the author of memoirs on Russian emigrants' literary life in China. In 2018, his collected works were published in Moscow. Under the name Valério Pereliéchin, he published a collection of poems in Portuguese and translated the Alexandrian chants by Mikhail Kuzmin into Portuguese, who was another gay poet just as Pereleshin.