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It's possible to be an experimental humanist.
List of contents
Introduction
Once Again: Into the Snow
A Few Notes on Poetry
People
Girl in Childhood
Dream: Flight of the Dragonfly
Now Always Snow
The Last Ravine
Silence
Farewell
Silence
Untitled
On Reading the Poem ¿Untitled¿ Aloud
Again: In Breaks Between Sleep
Field near Ferapontovo
¿Swallow¿: A Way of Connecting
Mother
Silence
Pines-with-Birch
Pine on Rock
Rose of Silence
Bidding Shalamov Farewell
And: One Year Later
The Shaman and the Potato
Five Matryoshkas
¿1947
Kazimir Malevich
Summer with Angels
The Tale of the Aging Harlequin
Winter Bender
N. Kh. Among the Paintings
Degree: Of Stability
Field: At the Height of Winter
This Year¿s Roses
Outskirts: Winter Without People
Reading Norwid
Past and Utopian
Regarding a Long-Distance Conversation
Song from the Time of Your Forefathers
Little Tatar Song
Excerpts from Thirty-six Variations on Chuvash and Tatar Folk Songs
Two Epilogues
Garden¿Grief
Response to a Friend¿s Book
Excerpts from Thirty-six Variations on Chuvash and Mari Folk Songs
Excerpts from Twenty-eight Variations on Chuvash and Udmurt Folk Songs
Starting from the Field
Long Ago
Summer with Prantel
In the Middle of the Field
Untitled
Field¿Without Us
About the author
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.
Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Poems by Gennady Aygi (forthcoming from 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 in 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.
Summary
It's possible to be an experimental humanist.
