Tag Archives: Russian poetry

One Day All This Will End

Translated from the Russian by Mariya Gusev and Rebecca Bella Wangh One day, all this will endFor sure, it will run its course —Bombs and buckwheat will run outTanks and matches will run outCannon fodder will run outCheese in the mousetrap will run outAir in a space suit will run outTime and money will run […]

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Literary roundup: WWB’s Young Russophonia + Rankov interview

Books From Slovakia has a fantastic interview Daniela Balážová held with Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, author of the recently translated It Happened on the First of September. Among many topics Rankov talks about how the different translations deal with all the different languages used in the novel (spoiler: differently) and also talks about the lost multicultural […]

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Yury Kazarnovsky in B O D Y

In 1927, Russian poet Yury Kazarnovsky was arrested along with 11 other students as part of what the Soviet authorities considered a subversive literary circle and was sent to the Solovki prison camp, generally considered the first Gulag. Despite its brutal hardships the camp had a cultural and intellectual life, among which is the literary […]

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Polina Barskova in B O D Y

“Applause to the mosquito – its blood-gorged pitch, Its trembling shadow, threaten the hunter with Rapture and prick of sorrow, once the battle is done And your combatant’s bitten the dust, filled with you.” From one of the three poems by Polina Barskova in B O D Y translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale. […]

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Literary roundup: Prague writers + a peasant Don Juan

PEN has announced its 2014 Translation Fund Winners and there are some cool and unusual writers that will be coming into English from this part of the world, and by this part of the world I mean in this case from a few blocks away from where I’m sitting writing this. One of the grants […]

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Anna Akhmatova in B O D Y

As Women in Translation Month continues and following the recent Q&A with Natasha Perova of Glas on contemporary Russian women fiction writers B O D Y brings you some translations of the great 20th century Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, who wrote under the name Anna Akhmatova. Selections from “Wild Honey is a Smell of […]

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Polina Barskova in B O D Y

As part of Women in Translation Month, B O D Y is presenting a selection of some of the best women poets and fiction writers whose work we’ve published in English translation over the past couple years. Today it is the poem “Manuscript Found By Natasha Rostova During The Fire” by Polina Barskova, translated from […]

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New and Novel

A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]

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Literary roundup: Found in Translation Award and falling in love with literary Russia

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has been awarded the 2012 Found in Translation Award, the best Polish translator award funded by the Polish Book Institute. The award, which until now was given for a single book translated from Polish, was instead awarded to Lloyd-Jones for “the entirety of her output from the previous year”. And an impressive output […]

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Literary roundup: Last poet of the Silver Age, exiled writers and a Bulgarian literary conversation

The new issue of Asymptote is out with a lot of great content in many languages and formats – fiction, poetry, drama, graphic novel, video and an especially interesting section of non-fiction including Arnon Grunberg on J.M. Coetzee and ghost stories collected on the streets of Berlin. From Central and Eastern Europe there are three […]

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