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Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age
of Russian literature in the early nineteenth century. His verses,
famous for their musicality, earned him the admiration of Aleksandr
Pushkin and generations of Russian poets to come. In Writings from
the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, Peter France interweaves
Batyushkov's life and writings, presenting masterful new
translations of his work with the compelling story of Batyushkov's
career as a soldier, diplomat, and poet and his tragic decline into
mental illness at the age of thirty-four. Little known among
non-Russian readers, Batyushkov left a varied body of writing, both
in verse and in prose, as well as memorable letters to friends.
France nests a substantial selection of his sprightly epistles on
love, friendship, and social life, his often tragic elegies, and
extracts from his essays and letters within episodes of his
remarkable life-particularly appropriate for a poet whose motto was
"write as you live, and live as you write." Batyushkov's writing
reflects the transition from the urbane sociability of the
Enlightenment to the rebellious sensibility of Pushkin and
Lermontov; it spans the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid social and
literary change from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I. Presenting
Batyushkov's poetry of feeling and wit alongside his troubled life,
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry makes his verse
accessible to English-speaking readers in a necessary exploration
of this transitional moment for Russian literature.
The tiny, arid Greek island of Patmos is one of the most sacred
places in the Christian world, and a place of bewitching power,
where people come for a brief summer visit and end up returning,
year after year, for the rest of their lives. In A Place of Healing
for the Soul, BBC commentator Peter France -- who arrived on the
island a hardened skeptic -- tells how he came to change his life
perspective. Learning from the island's gregarious inhabitants and
its religious eccentrics-hermits, ascetics, monks, and nuns -- he
discovered the pleasure and security of living simply and doing
without, in a timeless realm where history, myth, and spirituality
are endlessly alive.
Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived thought his country's savage wars
and radical traumas, trying to welcome the new order. But there was
no space in it for his kind of imagination. His poem "The Twelve"
has claims to being the first great poem of the Russian Revolution.
It remains enigmatic, the language elevated, the tone celebratory,
even mystical. Mayakovsky, bringing Revolution into the very
language and form of his poetry, wrote against Blok and the old
forms, answering "The Twelve" with "150,000,000". Trotsky wrote
"Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that
is what broke him." But for Pasternak and others among his
successors, he was a great and unofficial master. In this
collection, Jon Stallworthy and Peter France introduce a wide range
of Blok's poetry into English, retaining as much as possible his
distinctive form and tone. His early poetry is inspired by mystical
experience which did not entirely leave him during the Revolution,
and the Beautiful lady in his work is less a conceit than a
powerful enabler.
The poet Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Pushkin's school-friend, suffered
twenty years of imprisonment and Siberian exile for his part in the
ill-fated Decembrist rising of 1825 against the Russian autocracy.
His largely forgotten life and work are vividly recreated in
Kuchlya (1925), a pioneering historical novel by the eminent
literary scholar and Formalist theorist Yury Tynyanov. Writing at a
time when Stalin was tightening his grip on Soviet culture and
society, Tynyanov implicitly brings together the disquieting
experiences of the 1820s and the 1920s. In a lively, innovative
style, his gripping and moving narrative, here translated for the
first time, evokes the childhood, youth, beliefs and often absurd
adventures of a Quixotic, idealistic protagonist against the richly
complex backdrop of post-Napoleonic Russian society.
'Enlightenment' and 'Emancipation' as separate issues have received
much critical attention, but the complicated interaction of these
two great shaping forces of modernity has never been scrutinized
in-depth. The Enlightenment has been represented in radically
opposing ways: on the one hand, as the throwing off of the chains
of superstition, custom, and usurped authority; on the other hand,
in the Romantic period, but also more recently, as what Michel
Foucault termed 'the great confinement, ' in which 'mind-forged
manacles' imprison the free and irrational spirit. The debate about
the 'Enlightenment project' remains a topical one, which can still
arouse fierce passions. This collection of essays by distinguished
scholars from various disciplines addresses the central question:
'Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation?' Their responses,
working from within, and frequently across the disciplinary lines
of history, political science, economics, music, literature,
aesthetics, art history, and film, reveal unsuspected connections
and divergences even between well-known figures and texts. In their
turn, the essays suggest the need for further inquiry in areas that
turn out to be very far from closed. The volume considers major
writings in unusual juxtaposition; highlights new figures of
importance; and demonstrates familiar texts to embody strange
implications
The poet Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Pushkin's school-friend, suffered
twenty years of imprisonment and Siberian exile for his part in the
ill-fated Decembrist rising of 1825 against the Russian autocracy.
His largely forgotten life and work are vividly recreated in
Kuchlya (1925), a pioneering historical novel by the eminent
literary scholar and Formalist theorist Yury Tynyanov. Writing at a
time when Stalin was tightening his grip on Soviet culture and
society, Tynyanov implicitly brings together the disquieting
experiences of the 1820s and the 1920s. In a lively, innovative
style, his gripping and moving narrative, here translated for the
first time, evokes the childhood, youth, beliefs and often absurd
adventures of a Quixotic, idealistic protagonist against the richly
complex backdrop of post-Napoleonic Russian society.
Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and
enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia's great 19th
century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the
philosophical, social and literary struggles of Russia under Tsar
Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who
felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions
and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.
Mikhail Lermontov (1814 - 41) is best known in the West today as
the author of the novel A Hero of Our Time. But at the time of his
death, aged only 26, he was widely regarded as Russia's greatest
living poet. He achieved almost instant fame in 1837 with 'On the
Death of a Poet', his tribute to Pushkin - whose death in a duel
foreshadowed Lermontov's own. Over the course of the next four
years he went on to write many short poems, both lyric and
satirical, and two long verse narratives. He was particularly known
for his depictions of the Caucasus, where he was exiled for a time,
taking part in battles such as the one described in his poem
'Valerik'. Lermontov traced his ancestry to Scotland, and this book
offers a Scottish perspective on the Russian poet. Most of the
translators are Scottish or have Scottish connections, and some of
the poems are translated into Scots. As Peter France writes in his
introduction, this bicentennial volume aims to bring Lermontov's
poems to a new readership by enabling them to 'live again' in
English and in Scots.
Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been
conscious that Mandelstam was an outstanding figure, arguably the
outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. This is a
personal selection from the poetry — poems that for one reason or
another I wanted to translate. I have tried to make it reasonably
representative of different strands and periods in his work, with a
certain stress on the brilliant and fragmentary Voronezh poems.”
Gennady Aygi's longtime translator and friend Peter France has
compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of
the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the
Moscow "underground." Written in a quiet intensely expressive
poetic style, Aygi's inventive essays blend autobiography with
literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and
enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as
Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Transtroemer, along
with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native
Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the
essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam's elliptical travel musings and
Kafka's intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of
Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation.
"These leaves of paper," Aygi says, 'are swept up by the whirlwind
of festivity; everything whirls-from Earth to Heaven-and perhaps
the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the
rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.'
Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern
Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its
lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the
dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of
Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph
Brodsky wrote, developed into "a poetry of high velocity and
exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a
bardlike but a birdlike song ... something like a goldfinch
tremolo." Peter France-who has been brilliantly translating
Mandelstam's work for decades-draws heavily from Mandelstam's later
poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the
whole arc of the poet's tragically short life, from his early,
symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his
defiant "Stalin poem." A selection of Mandelstam's prose irradiates
the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his
Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the
sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante's Tuscany, and the centrality
of poetry in society.
Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age
of Russian literature in the early nineteenth century. His verses,
famous for their musicality, earned him the admiration of Aleksandr
Pushkin and generations of Russian poets to come. In Writings from
the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, Peter France interweaves
Batyushkov's life and writings, presenting masterful new
translations of his work with the compelling story of Batyushkov's
career as a soldier, diplomat, and poet and his tragic decline into
mental illness at the age of thirty-four. Little known among
non-Russian readers, Batyushkov left a varied body of writing, both
in verse and in prose, as well as memorable letters to friends.
France nests a substantial selection of his sprightly epistles on
love, friendship, and social life, his often tragic elegies, and
extracts from his essays and letters within episodes of his
remarkable life-particularly appropriate for a poet whose motto was
"write as you live, and live as you write." Batyushkov's writing
reflects the transition from the urbane sociability of the
Enlightenment to the rebellious sensibility of Pushkin and
Lermontov; it spans the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid social and
literary change from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I. Presenting
Batyushkov's poetry of feeling and wit alongside his troubled life,
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry makes his verse
accessible to English-speaking readers in a necessary exploration
of this transitional moment for Russian literature.
Ten meditations written in the two years before Rousseau's death in 1778 provide an excellent introduction to the thinker's complex world, expressing in its full force the agony of isolation and alienation.
This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its
focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational,
'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien regime meant
not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and
culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar
oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and
rustic, elite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason,
gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these
opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how
compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature,
needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of
garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized
and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality,
but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of
'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence
and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay
as a form of polite sociability.
This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its
focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational,
'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien regime meant
not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and
culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar
oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and
rustic, elite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason,
gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these
opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how
compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature,
needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of
garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized
and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality,
but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of
'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence
and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay
as a form of polite sociability.
This new textbook series is ambitious in scope. It will provide
concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature
from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not
confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will
cumulatively form a substantial library of textbooks on some of the
most important and widely read literary masterpieces. Each book is
devoted to a single work and provides a close reading of that text,
as well as a full account of its historical, cultural, and
intellectual background, a discussion of its influence, and a guide
to further reading. The contributors to the series give full
consideration to the linguistic issues raised by each text, and,
within the overall framework of the series, are given complete
freedom in the choice of their critical method. Where the text is
written in a language other than English, full account is taken of
readers studying the text in English translation. While critical
jargon is avoided, important technical terminology is fully
explained and thus this series will be genuinely accessible to
students at all levels and to general readers.
This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages
to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations
wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and
reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in
shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both
for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging
perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as
examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the
processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and
provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference
material.
In the one hundred and ten years covered by volume four of The
Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, what
characterized translation was above all the move to encompass what
Goethe called "world literature." This occurred, paradoxically, at
a time when English literature is often seen as increasingly
self-sufficient. In Europe, the culture of Germany was a new source
of inspiration, as were the medieval literatures and the popular
ballads of many lands, from Spain to Serbia. From the mid-century,
the other literatures of the North, both ancient and modern, were
extensively translated, and the last third of the century saw the
beginning of the Russian vogue. Meanwhile, as the British presence
in the East was consolidated, translation helped readers to take
possession of "exotic" non-European cultures, from Persian and
Arabic to Sanskrit and Chinese.
The thirty-five contributors bring an enormous range of expertise
to the exploration of these new developments and of the fascinating
debates which reopened old questionsabout the translator's task, as
the new literalism, whether scholarly or experimental, vied with
established modes of translation. The complex story unfolds in
Britain and its empire, but also in the United States, involving
not just translators, publishers, and readers, but also
institutions such as the universities and the periodical press.
Nineteenth-century English literature emerges as more open to the
foreign than has been recognized before, with far-reaching effects
on its orientation.
For all readers of literature, a fascinating reference book on how writing from all over the world, and from the earliest times to the present, has crossed into the English language, to enrich and influence English-speaking cultures. The opening section gives an overview of the history of translation into English and looks at theoretical issues, followed by a language-by-language history, including critical discussion and bibliographies, of what authors and literary works were translated when, by whom, and with what success.
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