Antiworlds, Poems by Andrei Voznesensky, Ed. by Patricia Blake & Max Hayward (used)

At thirty-three, Andrei Voznesenky has already achieved both national and international fame. In Russia, his poetry readings have drawn audiences as large as 14,000 and his most recent book has had 300,000 advance subscribers.

Although he was a protégé of Boris Pasternak, Voznesensky's idiom is completely original and contemporary. Robert Lowell says of him that he 'comes to us with the careless gaiety of the Twenties and Apollinaire. Surrealism sprouts from his fingertips: birds with aluminum bodies and women's faces, houses losing their walls, men losing their skins, a girl who sees the past as the future, and noses that go on growing all night. He writes about buildings, the New York airport, the Paris tea market, the days of Stalin, striptease girls, and Tolstoy. ... He is a difficult poet and the disciple of difficult poets, yet he moves large audiences, and I think this has encouraged him to give an immediate spoken vitality to his surprising thoughts and most ingenious images. "We were not born to survive, alas," he says, "but to step on the gas." Often he is stepping it up, but more often still, and frequently in quick shifts of tone, he has the steady sorrowing sympathy of Pasternak and Chekhov.... He is full of invention, fireworks, and humour... a first-rate craftsman who has had the heroic patience and imagination to be himself.'

The publication of Antiworlds represents a remarkable achievement i the art of translation. Six American poets-W. H. Auden, Jean Garrigue, Stanley Kunitz, Stanley Moss, William Jay Smith, and Richard Wilbur-were given literal translations and prosodic mode of the poems by Max Hayward. As the poets created English equivalents, Mr. Hayward continued to interpret for them the sense the sound, and the associations of the originals.

Richard Wilbur-were given literal translations and prosodic models of the poems by Max Hayward. As the poets created English equivalents, Mr. Hayward continued to interpret for them the sense, the sound, and the associations of the originals.

Patricia Blake, American journalist, critic, and specialist in Russian literature, is the editor of The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky and co-editor, with Max Hayward, of Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature and Halfway to the Moon: New Writing from Russia. Max Hayward is a Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is translator of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other books, co-translator of Dr. Zhivago, and co-editor of Literature and Kevolution in Soviet Russia 1917-1962.

condition: good (yellowed and worn cover)