Customer Reviews

Salt Crystals on an Axe: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry in Congruent Translation: A Bilingual Mini-Anthology

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Arguably, political history of the XX century was dominated by English and Russian-speaking people, presenting two competing models for the human future. Cultural interaction between these worlds was and still is very fruitful. Russian poetry occupies a central part in the Russian culture yet I think it was never properly translated on such a scale. This is a unique book as it presents a congruent translation
of a representative Anthology. The quality of translations is marvellous: as a bi-lingual person I can appreciate that one can indeed interleave stanzas of the translation with that of the original.
This is indeed "an opportunity to appreciate Russian poetry on its own terms".
Incidentally, the last line of Pasternak's Hamlet is better in the English version.

I think this book is a great gift for Anglophone poetry lovers and for bi-lingual people and families.
I also recommend it to Russian diaspora, in particular, to help them share their cultural heritage with their kids and friends.

Anglophone readers interested in twentieth-century Russian poetry have several anthologies to choose from, but this new book stands apart in one very important respect. Contrary to the main trend in poetic translation into English, it pays full attention to the form of Russian poems and provides translations that preserve the form to the greatest extent realistically possible. The need for doing this may not be immediately obvious, and the introduction to the book provides a thorough explanation, mostly in nontechnical language, of why this very difficult approach has been chosen - without shunning controversy where it naturally arises. It even convincingly argues with Vladimir Nabokov in the process. Importantly, it also explains what can be lost in translation in order to preserve the essential formal features - and it looks like it's not much that has to be lost.

Of course, completing the actual task of translation must have taken so much more than a carefully thought through system, and the translator of this volume has done a truly excellent job. As a native speaker of Russian and a published poet in this language, I can vouch that I could immediately recognize the voices of my favorite poets in these translations: not only what they were saying in their works, but also how they were saying it - and that, for me, is the most important thing. In fact, an argument can be made that in Russian poetry it is fundamentally impossible to separate "how" from "what", which makes preserving the "how" ever more important and this anthology ever more successful.