Long Fall: Poems, Texts, and Essays [Paperback]

Andrey Gritsman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2004

Long Fall is a must read for students of poetic translation, a primer for students of Russian-American Letters as well as a beginner'ss guide for those interested in probing the arc of literary historical projection.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrey Gritsman is a native of Moscow, Russia, immigrated to the US in 1981, lives in the New York City area, works as a physician. He is a poet, essayist and translator and writes in English and in his native Russian. Mr. Gritsman is the author of five volumes of poetry in Russian: No Man's Land (Petropol, S.-Petersburg), Double (Hermitage, New York), Transfer (Arion, Moscow) and Island in the Woods from the Pushkin Foundation Publishing House in S.-Petersburg. Book of essay on poetry Poet in Intercultural Space was published in Moscow in 2005. Andrey is the author of many publications in Russia, in Israel and in Europe in prestigious literary periodicals.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (August 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972066241
• ISBN-13: 978-0972066242
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,578,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars without capitols, November 30, 2004

By 

Jean A. Harris (Glen Cove, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long Fall: Poems, Texts, and Essays (Paperback)

long fall (a title without capitals, a book without capitols) is a book of practice. Essays and poems locate the poet and poetry in intercultural space. Insights of the emigre open a perspective on the detached, deranged, misfit position of the artist, the wanderer in all societies. The way this all works as a book: Gritsman the critic discusses Mandelstam, Brodsky, and Eliot, and the texts mysteriously widen to describe the condition of the writer (the Ur writer) and apply minutely to the poet, Andrey Gritsman. There's (an exciting) hall of mirrors effect, explained, I think, by Gritsman's having grown deeply into poets and poems. In all this, the intercultural writer survives as "a gifted and skillful scout...better oriented on this island than...the natives"--to turn an apercu on himself. Somewhere down around the bottom line: Gritsman is a gifted translator with the arsenal of technique at his back, with essays on Mandelstam to prove it. But there's more. As a poet, Gritsman operates in a landscape where it is

...as if an opaque story of a family

nests behind the house, in the garden
that is the insects' paradise, the world of tireless rodents.

Vestiges of life are stirring in the back rooms,
The walls hold reflections of the perpetual shadows

...This is a dominion
of light, the world where everyone is gone
--from "Magritte: Dominion of Light"

"...although [the] images and metaphors are complicated...{Gritsman} knows what he means and what he is talking about....this is not a suggestive medium of private symbols. This is a real life that is being lived with events and things skinned down to their final meanings," which is is a comment lifted from another context because it applies like a hand in a glove or a shoe that fits.