La voce di Achmatova, Esenin, Mandelstam, Majakovskij, Pasternak…

A Bilingual Web Anthology of Russian Verse

To any well-educated Russian it goes without saying that the glory of Russian literature is its poetic tradition. The works of such central figures as Pushkin, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky as well as those of a host of less renowned figures are treasured by the entire literate population, memorized, recited, and applied to the trials and tribulations of everyday life. This focus on the poetic tradition stands in stark contrast to the general opinion about Russian literature in Europe and the United States, where readers are far more apt to recognize prose writers like Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn than any of the poets mentioned above. To some extent this divergence of opinion is inevitable. “Poetry,” quipped Roman Jakobson, “is what cannot be translated.” While this is undoubtedly an exaggeration, poetry, like certain wines, frequently does not export well. Nevertheless, there are other, correctable reasons for the relative ignorance of Russian poetry in the English-speaking world, and we believe that the bilingual anthology presented here will be able to overcome them…

Nel sito, oltre a testi di poeti russi (1700-metà 1900) in doppia lingua russo/inglese, è possibile ascoltare Achmatova, Esenin, Mandelstam, Majakovskij, Pasternak ecc leggere (AUDIO) le proprie poesie.