After Pushkin

"How do you convince the English-speaking public that Pushkin's genius is as great as the Russians claim?" This question, arising at the bicentenary of Pushkin's birth, is the catalyst for a collection of new translations, versions of and responses to the poetry of Alexander Pushkin by some of the best poets writing in English today, from America, the Antipodes, Ireland and Great Britain. Published in collaboration with the Folio Society, After Pushkin is an exhilarating introduction to the greatest of the Russian Romantics. He is represented in his many guises: lyricist, satirist, epic poet. "Russians regard Pushkin as the fountainhead of their literature", writes poet and novelist Elaine Feinstein, who is also Pushkin's most recent and most celebrated biographer. "His poems have accompanied prisoners into Tsarist gaols and the Communist Gulag equally. All Russian writers Western readers have taken to their heart have recorded their debts to him, from his friend Gogol – to whom Pushkin, with prodigal generosity, gave the plots of "Dead Souls" and 'The Inspector General' – through Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and the greatest poets of the twentieth century". Hitherto his work has been best known to us through the operas of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky Korsakov. Though the poems included here represent only a fraction of Pushkin's work, they do manage to epitomise, refracted through nineteen lenses, some of his salient qualities of clarity, passion and high drama. He is hard to translate because his poetry is so deeply rooted in the rhythms and dictions of Russian poetry. In these new versions, many new qualities find their way into English poetry. Something happens when a fine poet engages, even if at a certain linguistic remove, with the work of a poet of Pushkin's magnitude.