I won't deny my love for Russian writers. It started with Dostoevsky in graduate school, even though the donkey beating scene in Crime and Punishment scared the bejesus out of me and made me put the book away for a few months before I was brave enough to finish it. I spent the Christmas break of my second year of grad school drowning myself in more Dostoevsky and also Tolstoy.
The previous year, I read Akmatova for the first time and was blown away. There's a difference between Russian novels and poetry for me: the former is highly philosophical and descriptive to the point where I feel I've been living with the characters my entire life, and the latter is so simple to the point of stripping away the images and associations that make up most of American poetry.
In the January 2010 issue of Poetry, I ran across poems by a Russian poet, Vera Pavlova, who has just been published in English for the first time. I fell in love with her poems immediately, and there was no doubt in my mind I would buy her book straightaway. I received it within the last week and find it refreshing to read her poems. It is so unlike the poems I normally read in journals. I applaud Poetry for continuing to publish poets in translation, for I cannot always find the time to seek out these poets on my own.
Here's a sampling of her work, from If There Is Something To Desire: 100 Poems.
11
Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows...
Let us love each other for misery,
let us torture each other,
mangle, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.
(translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour)
