Salt Crystals on an Axe: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry in Congruent Translation: A Bilingual Mini-Anthology

This bilingual collection of works by 56 Russian poets spans the whole of the 20th century, from Innokenty Annensky (1855-1909) to Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001), and reflects some of the characteristic styles and themes of the period. By giving preference to shorter pieces, it also provides a glimpse into the fascinating portable world of small-form poetry that is carried along by every cultured speaker of Russian. The all-new "congruent" translations, based on the system described and justified in Editor's Introduction, offer Anglophone readers a rare opportunity to appreciate Russian verse on its own terms, complete with its characteristic formal features.

The intended audience includes English-language poetry aficionados; students of Russian who wish to get to grips with the poetic language and form, and to understand the differences between English and Russian poetic traditions; translators and linguists interested in the theory and practice of verse translation; youngsters of English-Russian bilingual upbringing whose command of Russian falls short of the necessary standard for appreciating poetry in the original.

The book offers annotations to both the translations and the originals, a concise timeline of 20th-century Russian history putting the poems in context, and also indexes of metres and rhyme schemes intended for readers who may wish to find examples of a particular poetic form.

Testimonials

"It's been a great pleasure to read your translations. You are surely right in your belief that a poem's meaning and effect are inextricably bound up with its formal properties. These must be retained or approximated as far as possible if the translated poetry is to live as poetry and not dissolve into watery prose"

Timothy Steele
Professor of English, California State University
Winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award

"I very much liked the introduction; it is truly one of the few cases when I have seen an English translator from Russian consider in depth what meter and rhyme can mean for a translation. In a way I miss the old days of the Nabokov-Arndt polemic, when people were at least taking these matters seriously rather than ignoring them.

Translations of Evgeny Rein's poems are particularly fine, but many others struck me as quite successful including those of the works by Korzhavin and Slutsky -- and I could name others as well."

Barry Scherr
Professor of Russian, Dartmouth College

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on Presentation
Table of Symbols

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
What's in a Form?
Matching the Russian Form in English
-- Metre
-- Rhyme
-- Other formal features
-- Word order
-- The mapping table
Congruent Translation: Trying Harder
The Strategy
The Method
Preserving Individuality
The Principles of Selection
Organisation of the Content
Comparable Collections
References

THROUGH THE PALLID WINDOW PANE
Innokenty Annensky
Ivan Bunin
Alexander Blok

THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPS
Nikolai Gumilyov
Vladislav Khodasevich
Anna Akhmatova
Boris Pasternak
Osip Mandelstam
Marina Tsvetayeva
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Sergey Yesenin

A RED-CHESTED BULLFINCH
Nikolai Zabolotsky
Leonid Martynov
Semyon Kirsanov
Arseny Tarkovsky
Alexander Tvardovsky
Yyaroslav Smelyakov
Yan Satunovsky

TO SEE THIS DAY
Alexander Galich
Nikolai Glazkov
Boris Slutsky
Igor Kholin

THAT INTENSE BLUE COLOUR
David Samoilov
Alexander Mezhirov
Bulat Okudzhava
Naum Korzhavin
Konstantin Vanshenkin

RAYS EMPYREAN
Inna Lisnyanskaya
Gleb Gorbovsky
Robert Rozhdestvensky
Andrey Voznesensky
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Vsevolod Nekrasov

IN THE ULTIMATE BLACKNESS
Evgeny Rein
Olzhas Suleimenov
Alexander Kushner
Yunna Morits

AS IF FOREVER
Lev Loseff
Vladimir Vysotsky
Oleg Chukhontsev
Vladimir Zakharov
Joseph Brodsky
Dmitri A. Prigov
Victor Krivulin

THE ONE WHO WAKES
Alexei Tsvetkov
Ivan Zhdanov
Mikhail Aizenberg
Bakhyt Kenjeev
Alexander Yeryomenko
Sergey Gandlevsky

THE SAME OLD HEAVEN
Vladimir Vishnevsky
Evgeny Bunimovich
Timur Kibirov
Vera Pavlova
Konstantin Kravtsov
Boris Ryzhy

APPENDIX
Russian History of the 20th Century: a Timeline
Looking Up Samples
Metre Finder
Rhyme Scheme Finder
Index of Poets

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

English-Russian XX century, 2009-12-23
Arguably, political history of the XX century was dominated by English and Russian-speaking people, presenting two competing models for the human future. Cultural interaction between these worlds was and still is very fruitful. Russian poetry occupies a central part in the Russian culture yet I think it was never properly translated on such a scale. This is a unique book as it presents a congruent translation
of a representative Anthology. The quality of translations is marvellous: as a bi-lingual person I can appreciate that one can indeed interleave stanzas of the translation with that of the original.
This is indeed "an opportunity to appreciate Russian poetry on its own terms".
Incidentally, the last line of Pasternak's Hamlet is better in the English version.

I think this book is a great gift for Anglophone poetry lovers and for bi-lingual people and families.
I also recommend it to Russian diaspora, in particular, to help them share their cultural heritage with their kids and friends.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Salt Crystals on an Axe, 2009-11-23
Anglophone readers interested in twentieth-century Russian poetry have several anthologies to choose from, but this new book stands apart in one very important respect. Contrary to the main trend in poetic translation into English, it pays full attention to the form of Russian poems and provides translations that preserve the form to the greatest extent realistically possible. The need for doing this may not be immediately obvious, and the introduction to the book provides a thorough explanation, mostly in nontechnical language, of why this very difficult approach has been chosen - without shunning controversy where it naturally arises. It even convincingly argues with Vladimir Nabokov in the process. Importantly, it also explains what can be lost in translation in order to preserve the essential formal features - and it looks like it's not much that has to be lost.

Of course, completing the actual task of translation must have taken so much more than a carefully thought through system, and the translator of this volume has done a truly excellent job. As a native speaker of Russian and a published poet in this language, I can vouch that I could immediately recognize the voices of my favorite poets in these translations: not only what they were saying in their works, but also how they were saying it - and that, for me, is the most important thing. In fact, an argument can be made that in Russian poetry it is fundamentally impossible to separate "how" from "what", which makes preserving the "how" ever more important and this anthology ever more successful.

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