Translations from Russian

Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700929 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Twice under the Sun presents a cross-section of Anna Glazova's work from the past seven years, spectacularly translated—with the author's assistance—by Anna Khasin. The book is Ms Glazova's first book-length publication in English.

Published 2018. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616011 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

 

An extensive sampling of the whole of Mandelstam’s career from his first collection up to the late poems that were memorised by his wife, when it was too dangerous to have them written down. One of the great poets of the first half of the 20th century, Mandelstam is one of the figures who needs to be translated and re-translated, being too important to be taken for granted.

Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon
Published 2022. Paperback, 178pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618350 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Osip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his "Stalin Epigram" in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to Mandelstam's consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however, they also bear the marks of Mandelstam's attempts to somehow reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts and the memory of Mandelstam's wife and executor, Nadezdha Mandelstam.

Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon
Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618367 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St. Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to none.

Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610606 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Flags was the only volume of poetry published by the Russian emigré poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935) during his own lifetime. A significant Surrealist volume, it is one of the "lost" creations of a man who has been called the greatest of the Russian emigré poets. Now recovered by Russian literary experts and re-edited for a new public, Poplavsky is gaining the readership that eluded him in his lifetime. Unusually, this book presents the complete contents of the original volume (Paris, 1933), rather than presenting a Selected or some other overview, and thus opens a window onto a fascinating and unfairly neglected figure.

Published 2022. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848618435 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and November 1918, and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates only on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, and their importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioned and endangered humanity, including those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time, to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that ‘It befits heroes to be frozen’, she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, very personal heroism, at a stage when the very worst was still to come.

Published 2021. Paperback, 164pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848617780 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

This bilingual collection contains six of Tsvetaeva’s acclaimed narrative poems. She always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented ‘On a Red Steed’ to the lyrical-confessional ‘Poem of the Mountain’ and ‘Poem of the End’ to the more metaphysical later poems, ‘An Attempt at a Room’, a beautiful requiem for Rilke, ‘New Year’s Greetings’, and ‘Poem of the Air’, a stirring celebration of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul’s freedom.

Published 2020. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617315 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The poems in Youthful Verses cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Marina Tsvetaeva’s life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet. Despite a disturbing undercurrent of self-denigration, these poems are characterised throughout by deft humour, a pervasive sense of mischief, and a high degree of formal perfection.

Published 2015. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20 

ISBN 9781848614161 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Milestones (Vyorsty) is an early collection by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), published in Moscow in 1922, before she left the country for the West. The book celebrates­—among other things—her friendship with fellow-poet, Osip Mandelstam, and was her most innovative collection to that point, as well as an indication of the way her work would develop in her full maturity as a writer.