Life, Life by Arseny Tarkovsky

Life, Life by Arseny Tarkovsky

A book of poetry by Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Virginia Rounding. Includes many poems used in Arseny's son's films (Andrei Tarkovsky). With a bibliography of both Arseny and his son Andrei Tarkovsky, and illustrations from Tarkovsky's movies.

This is one of the very few translations in English of poetry by Arseny Tarkovsky available.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was was born in June 1907 in Elizavetgrad, later named Kirovograd. He studied at the Academy of Literature in Moscow from 1925 to 1929, and also worked in the editorial office of the journal Gudok. He was well respected as a translator, especially of the Oriental classics, but was little known as a poet for most of his life, being unable to get any of his own work published during the Stalinist era. His poems did not begin to appear in book form until he was over fifty. His son, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, made extensive use of his father's in some of his films, and certain of his diary entries indicate the esteem in which the poet was held in the Soviet Union towards the end of his life. An entry written after Andrei had given a talk at the Moscow Physical Institute in 1980, for instance, reproduces the following note from a member of the audience: 'An enormous number of people in this hall admire Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky as a great Russian poet. Please convey our respects to him.' One of the few recorded public appearances of Arseny Tarkovsky was at the funeral of Anna Akhmatova; he was one of three writers deputed to accompany her coffin from Domodedovo to Leningrad, and he read both at her funeral in Komarovo and at the first evening held in her memory in Moscow. He died in 1989 and is now beginning to be recognised as one of the many significant Russian poets of the twentieth century.

From the poem;Ignatyevo Forest':

The last leaves' embers in total immolation

Rise into the sky; this whole forest

Seethes with irritation, just as we did

That last year we lived together.

Illustrated. With bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714300.

www.crmoon.com

Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad) in 1907 and came to Moscow in 1923, where he worked as a journalist for a newspaper and published his first poetry. He was a well-known translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets by the late 1930s. From 1942 to 1944, he was a war journalist for the Soviet Army newspaper Battle Alarm, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Star for gallantry. Before the Snow, Tarkovsky's first collection of his own poems, was published in 1962 when he was 55 years old and quickly sold out. When his son, the globally known filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, used some of his father's poetry in his films, his fame grew even more.

Philip Metres is the author or translator of several books and chapbooks, including SAND OPERA (Alice James Books, 2015), COMPLETE CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELIES: POETIC TEXTS OF LEV RUBINSTEIN (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), A Concordance of Leaves (Diode Press, 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011), TO VIEW THE His work has earned him two National Endowment for the Arts awards, the Thomas J. The Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, a Russian Institute for Literary Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship are among the awards she has received. Dimitri Psurtsev, a Russian poet and translator of British and American authors, teaches at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives outside of Moscow with his wife Natalia and daughter Anna.

Yelena Pakhomova Press released his two books of poetry, Ex Roma Tertia and Tengiz Notepad, in 2001, and the Hudson Review published translations of his poems in 2009 and 2011. I BURNED AT THE FEAST: SELECTED POEMS OF ARSENY TARKOVSKY earned a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2014, which Dimitri shared with Philip Metres.