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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry’s pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the ‘Golden Age’ of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the ‘Silver Age’ (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors.

This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets – Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them – in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet.

Author

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Robert Chandler studied Russian at Leeds University and spent the academic year 1973-74 as a British Council exchange scholar in Voronezh, a large city 200 miles south of Moscow.

His translations of Sappho and Apollinaire are published in the series Everyman’s Poetry. His own poems have been published in the TLS and elsewhere, but he is best known for his translations from Russian. These include Alexander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows, The Road and Life and Fate, many works by Andrey Platonov, and Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Railway, set in Central Asia.

He has compiled three anthologies for Penguin, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, published in February 2015. He is also the author of Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin.

For several years he has taught classes in literature and translation at Queen Mary, University of London. He also works as a mentor for the BCLT mentorship scheme.

His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his co-translation of Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.

Irina Mashinski

Irina Mashinski

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator, and the author of nine books of poetry in Russian. Her work has appeared in Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek and The London Magazine amongst others and has been translated into several languages. She is co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet/Cardinal Points literary project, the editor of the Storony Sveta Literary Journal and co-editor of the Cardinal Points Journal. She received the Russian America (2001) and Maximilian Voloshin (2003) Awards in poetry, and, with Boris Dralyuk, First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. Mashinski holds a Ph.D. in Physical Geography from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an M.F.A. in Poetics from New England College.

She lives in the US.

Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk

Books

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Boris Dralyuk holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA and has been a lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews.

His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, World Literature Today and other journals. He is the translator of Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need (Calypso Editions, 2010), A Slap in the Face: Four Russian Futurist Manifestos (Insert Blanc, 2013), Anton Chekhov’s Little Trilogy (Calypso Editions, 2014), and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2014); co-translator of Polina Barskova’s The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011) and Dariusz Sośnicki’s The World Shared: Poems (BOA Editions, 2014); and author of the monograph Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934 (Brill, 2012). He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition.

Translator

Various

Various

Books

The Book of Khartoum

Thoraya El-Rayyes’ translations have appeared in literary journals/magazines, including World Literature Today and Banipal. In 2014 she received the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for her translation of Hisham Bustani. Mohammed Ghalaieni was raised bilingually and schooled in Gaza from the age of ten, working on translation projects in New York and Gaza. Sarah Irving is the author and editor of several books, and teaches Arabic at the University of Edinburgh. Elisabeth Jaquette is a graduate student at Columbia University, regularly translates for journals/magazines, and has worked with the PEN World Voices Festival. Andrew Leber is based in Doha, and has translated excerpts of Syrian and Palestinian Literature, including Hani al-Rahib and Atef Abu Saif. Adam Talib teaches classical Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, and is the translator of Fadi Azzam, Khairy Shalaby and Mekkawi Said, to name a few.

Published by

Penguin Classics, 2015
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An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry’s pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the ‘Golden Age’ of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the ‘Silver Age’ (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors.

This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets – Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them – in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet.

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