Alexander Pushkin (Everyman's Poetry) [Paperback]

Alexander Pushkin (Author), A. D. P. Briggs (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1997

Russias greatest poet Puskin led a short but turbulent life. His poetry tacklesthe great themes of the human condition: Love and sex nature and art the individual and social.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Arion
Autumn
The Avalanche
Bacchanal Song
The Beauty
Beneath The Blue Skies Of Her Homeland
The Bronze Horseman
The Captive In The Caucasus
The Caucasus
The Cloud
A Confession
Deep Down In Your Siberian Mine
Demons
The Don
Elegy
Exegi Monumentum
The Flower
Foreboding
From Hafiz. Camp On The Euphrates
From Yevgeny Onegin (33-51 Inclusive)
Gift Of Life So Useless
The Godyssey, Or The Deviliad (gavriiliada)
Grapes
Gypsy Girl's Song
I Have Outlived My Aspirations
I Visited Again
Life May Not Fulfil Its Promise
Madonna
The Mournful Melodies That Fall
No, Not For Me The Stormiest Pleasures Of The Senses
Oh, I Have Loved You
One Record More Remains, The Last Of All
The Poet
A Prayer
The Prophet
The Rain-quenched Day Has Died
Remembrance
The Shadows Of The Night Lie On The Georgian Hills
The Singer
Take Not Away My Wits, O God
The Talisman
Three Springs
The Time Has Come, Dear Friend
To Anna Kern
To Chaadayev
To My Nanny
To The Poet
Towards The Shores Of Your Far Homeland
The Upas Tree
Verses Composed During A Sleepless Night
The Waggon Of Life
What Is My Name To You?
When I Reach Over To Enfold You
When I Stroll Down A Busy Street
When, Lost In Thought, I Roam
Winter Evening
Winter Morning
Winter. What Shall We Do Out In The Country?
A Zephyr Flies
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From the Publisher

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Product Details

• Paperback: 103 pages
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Group, Ltd. (June 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 046087862X
• ISBN-13: 978-0460878623
• Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 5.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,300,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, fast fun, August 15, 2002

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Alexander Pushkin (Everyman's Poetry) (Paperback)

This book of poems can be read quickly. It includes English translations by up to ten other poets, but 33 of the 60 poems in this book have been translated by A. D. P. Briggs. Briggs also revised the translation of the 57th. Poem 16, "The Caucasus" is credited to F. Cornford on pages xxi and 19, but the Acknowledgements on page 104 credits a book, POEMS FROM THE RUSSIAN (1943), "trans. Frances Cornfield and Esther Polianowski." Of the Pushkin poems translated by C. M. Bowra in a book from 1948, eight poems are included in this book.

The Contents lists the titles of the poems, and the Introduction explains poetic qualities which the translations in this volume attempt to match, "partly to ensure that interesting formal properties like these are not lost." (p. xv). The first paragraph on page xvi attempts to show how the poems "are grouped roughly thematically," into personal, the natural world, poetry, love, some poems of ideas, for the first half of the book. The longer works in the final portion of the book include the concluding stanzas of YEVGENY ONEGIN, Chapter 8, Stanzas 33-51.

A few things about this book seemed British to me. The word which made the least sense to me was "judder," in the poem "The Waggon of Life," on page 39. If the word was made up to produce a rhyme, the line it was in would have made more sense if it had ended with the common word, shudder:

Feeling the waggon shake and shudder.

The stanza doesn't end with: "We cry, `Slow down you silly buggy!"

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On the cutting edge of letting it all hang out., August 17, 2002

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Alexander Pushkin (Everyman's Poetry) (Paperback)

This book of poems can be read quickly. It includes English translations by nine other poets, but most (33) of the 60 poems in this book have been translated by A. D. P. Briggs, who has devoted four books to Pushkin and has also edited four other volumes in the Everyman's Poetry series. Briggs also revised Chapter 8 of Oliver Elton's translation of Yevgeny Onegin, which he describes in the Introduction as, "A few stanzas from the end of the novel are included here in order to give a general impression of how the novel works." (p. xvii). Poem 16, "The Caucasus" is credited to F. Cornford on pages xxi and 19, but the Acknowledgements on page 104 credits a book, POEMS FROM THE RUSSIAN (1943), "trans. Frances Cornfield [this mistake might be due to the enormous number of actual cornfields that currently exist on this planet] and Esther Polianowski." Of the Pushkin poems translated by C. M. Bowra in a book from 1948, eight poems are included in this book.

The Contents lists the titles of the poems, and the Introduction explains poetic qualities which the translations in this volume attempt to match, "partly to ensure that interesting formal properties like these are not lost." (p. xv). The first paragraph on page xvi attempts to show how the poems "are grouped roughly thematically," into the order in which the themes are encountered in the first poem in this book, "Winter. What shall we do out in the country?" Pushkin's major themes are identified as the personal, the natural world, poetry, love, some poems of ideas, and his poems on those topics comprise the first half of the book. The longer works in the final portion of the book include the concluding stanzas of YEVGENY ONEGIN (which has 366 stanzas altogether), Chapter 8, Stanzas 33-51.

The poems "Remembrance" and "Elegy" are mentioned as examples of a Pushkinian philosophy of life. Thoughts "Settle in limpid twilight languidly distilled," as the third line of the poem "Remembrance" puts it. Pushkin is capable of other feats, and the introduction observes that one long poem, "(known in Russian as `Gavriiliada' after the angel Gabriel) is an overtly sacreligious re-enactment of several Bible stories (Adam and Eve, Joseph and Mary, the Annunciation, etc.) run together into an extended sexual romp." (p. xviii). This kind of thing is usually considered a catastrophe, as far as serious philosophy is concerned, and "In its day Pushkin could not acknowledge authorship; neither could Russian criticism until recently." (p. xviii). It reminds me of the poem, "the boys i mean are not refined," by e. e. cummings, which was only included in a limited edition of nine copies of his book, NO THANKS, in 1935, but was dropped in subsequent editions until after his death in 1962. Similarly, the introduction by A. D. P. Briggs notices Pushkin's use of "swearwords in `The Waggon of Life'," (p. xix) which Briggs called, "language unusable until recent times in both Russia and England." (p. xvii). Anything that I might say about such language might be considered totally off the subject here, but a revisionist view of the relationship between poetry and philosophy might make some personal comments appropriate here.

As author of the unpublished, unedited, and largely unwritten MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, any claim that I might make to knowledge of philosophy is highly suspect, similarly to the status achieved by Martin Heidegger when he is considered the Nazi philosopher. In my case, the must dubious aspect of convergence might be expressed by using the phrase *peace with honor* instead of any swearword that might appear. This could be catastrophic for the poetic values involved, but purely for philosophical reasons, I would like to insert *peace with honor* in place of the swearwords in Pushkin's poem, "The Waggon of Life." The second and third stanza become:

We climb aboard the boards at dawn

Full of wild devilment and crowing;

Spurning the lanquid life with scorn,

We cry, `Go on, get *peace with honor* going!'

But by midday we've lost that boldness,

Feeling the wagon shake and judder.

Dread are the heights and dizzy gorges,

We cry, `Slow down you silly *peace with honor*!'

A few things about this book seemed British to me. The word which made the least sense to me was "judder," in the poem "The Waggon of Life," on page 39. If the word was made up to produce a rhyme, the line it was in would have made more sense if it had ended with the common word, shudder:

Feeling the waggon shake and shudder.

The stanza doesn't end with: "We cry, `Slow down you silly buggy!"