Selected Poetry

by Alexander Pushkin, Antony Wood (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020

Alexander Pushkin established what we know as Russian literature. This collection includes his strongly personal lyric verse, which springs spontaneously from his everyday life - his numerous loves, his exile, his hectic life in St Petersburg - while the narrative poems here, from exotic Southern tales to comic parodies and fairy tales of enchanted tsars, display his endless ability to surprise. His landmark work The Bronze Horseman, with its ghostly central figure of Peter the Great, holds the meaning of all Russian history. Antony Wood's translations reveal the variety, inventiveness and perfection of Pushkin's verse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780241207154
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	04/23/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	746,154
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Alexander Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799. He was exiled for his liberal views on serfdom and autocracy, but this allowed him the freedom to write some of his greatest works, including his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. He died in 1837 after being fatally wounded in a duel.

Antony Wood is an editor and translator from Russian and German, and also runs the publishing house Angel Books.

Editorial Reviews

“Selected Poetry is a modest title, yet the book reaches high. It recounts the poet’s life and works; provides compact, sometimes provocative scholarly commentary for each poem; and glosses every term or name or event that readers might query, thus creating a rich literary, historical and cultural context for individual texts. Wood’s lively translations will not elicit any ripostes that the work is flat. On the contrary, they grasp the irrepressible sense of freedom which is the poet’s hallmark ... Pushkin is lucky in Antony Wood. Pleasure is to be found on every page of this book.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“This Selected Poetry by Anthony Wood supersedes all previous translations of Pushkin’s other verse narratives. Wood’s The Bronze Horseman gives us Pushkin at his most tragic. Count Nulin, a witty parody of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, shows him at his most light-hearted. The Tale of Tsar Saltan — one of Pushkin’s verse fairy tales — bounces along with delightful vitality. Even with the delicately musical short lyrics — still harder to translate — Wood’s success rate is remarkable.”
—Robert Chandler, The Financial Times

From the Publisher