I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky - Softcover

Tarkovsky, Arseny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996316701 ISBN 13: 9780996316705

Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015

Synopsis

Poetry. Film. Translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev. "Tarkovsky now joins the ranks of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Brodksky. Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev's translations—succinct and allusive, stingingly direct and yet sweeping, mournful and celebratory—are marvels."—PEN/Heim citation

"How does one translate the work of Russian classic, Arseny Tarkovsky? Imagine trying to translate Yeats: high style rhetoric, intense emotion, local tonalities of language, complicated historical background, the old equation of poet vs. state, the tone of a tender love lyric, all meshed into one, all exquisite in its execution—and all so impossible to render again. And yet, one tries. In the case of Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, one tries brilliantly, with gusto, with passion, with attentiveness that is akin to that of a prayer, with the ear of real poets. The result? The gravity and directness of Tarkovsky's tone is brought into English without fail, it is here, honest and pained, piercing and even shy at times, like a deer that looks straight at you before it runs. Tarkovsky's ambition was to seek us—those who live after him—through earth, through time. He does so in this brilliant translation."—Ilya Kaminsky

"Arseny Tarkovsky was ten years old at the time of the Russian Revolution and died six months before the opening of the Berlin Wall. He spent his career as a poet creating elegant and starkly interior transfigurations of simple happiness and pure grief, triumphs of the individual self against the brutal realities of daily life in wartime and Communist Russia. Through this meticulous translation of his work, readers will encounter a metaphysical complex poetry, at once searing and brooding, very much in dialogue with such great Soviet poets as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Tarkovsky writes of a country where 'we lived, once upon a time, as if in a grave, drank no tea' but still succeeded in making 'bread from weeds,' where the 'blue sky is dim' but nonetheless manages to be the 'wet-nurse of dragonflies and birds.'"—Michael Dumanis

About this title

About the Author

Dimitri Psurtsev, a Russian poet and translator of British and American authors, is a professor at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives outside Moscow with his wife Natalia and daughter Anna. His two books of poetry, Ex Roma Tertia and Tengiz Notepad, were published in 2001 by Yelena Pakhomova Press and translations of his poems were published by the Hudson Review in 2009 and 2011. In 2014 Dimitri received, along with Philip Metres, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0996316701
• ISBN 13: 9780996316705
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232