Customer Reviews

An Arrow in the Wall: Selected Poetry and Prose

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It's a pity such a nice collection of poetry is now out of print, since Andrey Voznesenskiy is such a great poet, and one of Russia's finest living poets (even if my own favorite Russian poet is Yevgeniy Yevtushenko). The poems in this volume are culled from three different collections--'Antiworlds,' 'Nostalgia for the Present,' and 'Release the Cranes.' There are also two long works of prose closing out the collection, "I Am Fourteen" and "O." The former essay has always stuck in my mind, because I find it so touching and selfless how Boris Pasternak took the young Andrey under his wing, mentored him, befriended him, encouraged him, and believed in him, forming a friendship that lasted the rest of the elder poet's life, treating him like a talented equal, instead of laughing and throwing his schoolboy verses in the trash when he took that chance and wrote to his idol when he was 14 years old. I don't think that all that many established writers or poets, whatever their country of origin, would take so much personal interest in and even become close friends with a much-younger person who dreams of becoming a writer too and idolises that person.

There are so many wonderful poems in here that it's hard to know where to start, but some of the standouts include "Applefall," "Elegy for My Mother," "The More You Tear Off, the More You Keep," "Chagall's Cornflowers," "The Eternal Question," and "Nostalgia for the Present." For those who are bilingual or who are students of Russian, it's an added bonus that, except for the two prose pieces at the end, the Russian originals are printed on opposite pages from the English translations. Translation being what it is, sometimes they take some liberties to make it rhyme or sound more poetic in English; I remember choosing one of the poems in this collection for a public speaking class I took as a sophomore in college, "The Great Confrontation," and presented both the original Russian and my own translation of it, which was a bit different from the official one. There are also a few poems where he refers to his beloved mentor as Boris Leonidovich, yet the translations render that, respectively, as Pasternak ("Lament for Two Unborn Poems") and Boris Pasternak ("The Schoolboy"). That might be a small point, but it still bothers me, since that's not the form of address Russians generally use, let alone for someone who's such a dear friend. The first name-last name thing is a Western convention; Russians use the first name and patronymic as the default form of address and to show politeness and respect. Overall, though, this is a very good place to start if one is interested in exploring the works of one of Russia's best modern poets.