These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve',...
"what a poet and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embraced a cloud But when I soared it rained." —Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” (1954) Mayakovsky's is one of the most compelling voices in twentieth-century Russian poetry. Born in 1893, he joined the Futurist movement in 1912 and soon established himself as one of Russia's major poets. In 1917, he rallied to the Russian Revolution and remained the indisputable leader of its artistic avant-garde until his suicide in 19...
Birds, Beasts and a World Made New
by Velimir Khlebnikov and Guillaume Apollinaire
“Wonderful . . . and full of life. This is a book for discovery, for pleasure and delight.” – George Szirtes, author of The Photographer at Sixteen A revelatory volume of 2 of the 20th century’s great poetic innovators, Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov, in vibrant new translations by Robert Chandler Offering a fresh angle on two of the most innovative poets of the 20th century, and grouping poems by theme, celebrated translator and poet Robert Chandler finds surprising connections...
How Fire Descends (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
by Serhiy Zhadan
A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation “Reading these words now is enough to make one’s breath catch. [Ukraine’s western partners] do not see themselves as members of its funeral processions; they do not routinely line the streets and kneel before passing coffins.”—Linda Kinstler, Times Literary Supplement Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in...
The founding father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a long-lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no mean less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works...
What We Live For, What We Die For (World Republic of Letters (Yale)) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
by Serhiy Zhadan
An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation “This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Li...
Few moments, certainly few speeches, in the 20th century so radically altered the flow of international events and specifically the direction of Russian history as Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 attack on the cult of Joseph Stalin. Overnight, a society under the lock and key of ideology and the eye of a secret police was sprung loose, entering into a period that has since come to be known as “the Thaw.” Suddenly, citizens like the young Moscow architect, Vladimir Azarov, were free to read banned Russ...
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name."
Pushkin Eugene Onegin And Other Poems (Everyman's Library POCKET POETS)
by Alexander Pushkin
Pushkin was the first Russian writer of European stature, and he is among the very few artists - such as Homer and Shakespeare - to have shaped the consciousness and history of an entire nation and its language, thereby affecting the world at large. Eugene Onegin is not merely the greatest poem in the Russian language by its most influential poet: it is a global culture, social and political icon of the highest order. The historical power of this work - a novel in verse - is made all the more ex...
Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this "Collected Poems in English" for the first time gathers all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. His own efforts to translate his...
The Nightgown is a mythic, mystic, and hungry collection of poems, a roiling landscape wandered over by wild swerves of language, creatures of all sorts, and mysterious beings such as The Folklore, The Hurt Opera, The Eunuch, and the titular angry Nightgown. Haunted by the magic and transformations of Slavic and Western European fairy tales, the symbolism of the Tarot, the medieval world, feminism, and a mythology all its own, The Nightgown bears an immigrant’s fascination with the alien syrup o...
"Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, winner of a number of international literary prizes, and translated into over twenty languages, Gennady Aygi is regarded as one of the most important Russian poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is a poet of the country and stands totally against the classical tradition of Russian poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky."—Poetry London Newsletter "Gennady Aygi is considered to be a major and original voice in contemporary poetry. A...
In Blood Flower, passionate imagery married to music bursts from each line pushing out the boundaries of Uschuk's earlier poems. It continues themes in Uschuk's American Book Award winner, Crazy Love. The poems braid the startling, sometimes brutal stories of her Russian/Czech immigrant family during the McCarthy Era in a conservative Michigan farming community with stories of courageous individuals, especially women, who persevere to love, despite it all. Uschuk's step-grandfather, father, brot...
Vyt Bakaitis, poet and eminent translator from the Lithuanian, has gathered here poems from the past decade. This new collection, Refuge & Occasion, pursues several strands that ultimately braid together with characteristic freedom of shape and music whereby the requirements of the utterance design its flow. He writes: “Strange all I found and still carry/ what I remember left me to wonder.” Elegies and lyrics of erotic loss, tensely noted and feelingly unwound form one strand. The poet turns hi...
The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Translation Classics)
by Marcelijus Martinaitis
Set in the Stalinist era, when Lithuaniaís farmers lost everything ñ their villages, their land, and even their way of life ñ to the process of collectivisation, this book documents the life of the village idiot/anarchistic trickster Kukutis. Incapable of understanding or following the laws and rules of the totalitarian regime, and knowing nothing of strictures or borders, he says and does what he likes, thus becoming a potent symbol of freedom until the downfall of communism in Lithuania. Toget...
'Brodsky charged at the world . . . there is no voice, no vision, remotely like it' The New York Times Book ReviewSelf-educated, intense, impulsive and unmoored, Joseph Brodsky emerged in mid-century Russia as a poetic virtuoso, recognized by such greats as Anna Akhmatova as their worthy heir. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, the poems in this volume unfold the project that, as Brodsky saw it, the condition of exile presented: 'to set the next man - however theoretical he...
This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. ‘Zima Junction’ vividly describes his idyllic childhood in Siberia and his impressions of home after a long absence in Moscow. Private moments are captured in ‘Waking’, on the joys of discovering the unexpected in a lover, and ‘Birthday’, on a mother’s concern for her son,...
War of the Beasts and the Animals (Modern Poetry in Translation)
by Maria Stepanova
War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. IImmensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in German translation in 2...
Chuvash-born poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is considered the father of late-Soviet avant-garde Russian poetry. This first full-length critical study of his work and poetics in any language brings a new voice into the critical conversation of twentieth-century poetry of witness. It charts the development of Aygi's poetics from his Mayakovsky-inspired verses as a student under the tutelage of Boris Pasternak, to those of a full-fledged poet's poet, drawing equally on the Russian poetic and religio...