Three Centuries: Three Poets

by Lyn Coffin

Overview

With its rich heroic and mythological folk poetry and 1500 years of lyrical poetry, Georgian culture depends as much on the verse as it does on music, wine, and Christianity. Lyn Coffin’s anthology samples this culture by translating the greatest of Georgia’s 19th century Romantics, the most beloved of 20th-century lyrical symbolists, and one of the most interesting of contemporary poets. Lyn Coffin is perhaps the first professional English-language poet to devote her time and talent to the task of translating Georgian poetry, a poetry which, largely because of the language’s complexity, the extraordinary rhyming virtuosity of its poets and the often complex, half-Oriental, half-Occidental outlook of its culture has been considered one of the most resistant to translation.

Nikoloz Baratashvili had the genius and mystery to attract attention outside his own land.

...the intertwining of folk myth and literary Symbolism, and the musicality: they show Galaktion Tabidze as a magus comparable to W. B. Yeats. “ - Donald Rayfield, OBE, Professor, Russian and Georgian Studies, Queen Mary University of London

"Dato Barbakadze speaks with a distinct voice and rare vision.... Always, poem by poem, there is within the poetry the warmth of real humanity and the brightness, the hungry intelligence of his song, fresh as new-fallen snow." - Sam Hamill (1943-2018), master American poet

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164091583
Publisher:	Adelaide Books Publishers
Publication date:	05/25/2020
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	487 KB

About the Author

She has been an Associate Editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and previously taught English at the University of Washington, Renton High School, the University of Michigan Residential College, Detroit University, MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Arts and Design), University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Ilia State University at Tbilisi, Georgia, Jih Elementary School at Marianské Lázně, Czechoslovakia, and Mando Technical Institute, as well as Council House and the Summit at Capitol Hill.

Coffin is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and translation. She has published fiction, poetry, and non-fiction in over fifty quarterlies and small magazines, including Catholic Digest and Time magazine. One of her fictions, originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review appeared in Best American Short Stories 1979, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Her plays have been performed at theaters in Malaysia, Singapore, Boston, New York (Off Off Broadway), Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. She has given poetry readings with Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, and Philip Levine, among others.

She is a member of Washington Poets' Association, Poets West, and Greenwood Poets. Poezia Press published Coffin's translation in shairi of The Knight in the Panther Skin "Shota Rustaveli's The Knight in the Panther Skin", a 12th-century epic poem from the country of Georgia. It has been largely unknown to English-speaking audiences because few translations have been produced.