Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Sarah Valentine. "It's possible to be an experimental humanist." Animated by an elemental sense of life, mortality, and humanity, the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi wrote poems that fused his experience of ethnic difference with an avant-garde aesthetic. Artfully translated from the Russian by poet and scholar Sarah Valentine, these strong, precise poems challenge language to plumb the depths of human feeling and simultaneously attune to linguistic experimentalism.
Author City: Chuvashia RUS
Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He wrote and lived during times of extreme terror and suffering for the people of the Soviet Union and because of the repressive censorship, like many writers of his generation Aygi could only publish his work abroad, and even then at great peril to himself and the people who helped him smuggle his work out of the country.
Reviews and Other Links
Amy Henry @ HTMLGIANT
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright @ The Brooklyn Rail
about the translator:
Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, INTO THE SNOW: POEMS BY GENNADY AYGI (Wave Books, fall 2011), is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006). Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics. Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University. She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA. Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.