Peter France

Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into “a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song … something like a goldfinch tremolo.”

Peter France—who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam’s work for decades—draws heavily from Mandelstam’s later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet’s tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant “Stalin poem.” A selection of Mandelstam’s prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante’s Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.

Gennady Aygi’s longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the Moscow “underground.” Written in a quiet intensely expressive poetic style, Aygi’s inventive essays blend autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Tranströmer, along with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam’s elliptical travel musings and Kafka’s intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation. “These leaves of paper,” Aygi says, “are swept up by the whirlwind of festivity; everything whirls—from Earth to Heaven—and perhaps the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.”

Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an outstanding figure, arguably the outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. This is a personal selection from the poetry — poems that for one reason or another I wanted to translate. I have tried to make it reasonably representative of different strands and periods in his work, with a certain stress on the brilliant and fragmentary Voronezh poems.”

The transparent one still sings to no avail, still swallow, Antigone, beloved girl …

Lifelong Aygi translator and friend Peter France wrote in The Guardian: “Aygi wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century.” Field-Russia is a book of poems arranged shortly before Aygi’s death, which in his view occupied a central place in his work. The collection opens with an informal conversation about poetry, and is followed by a series of little lyric “books”—Field-Russia, Time of the Ravines, and Final Departure—that form a part of Aygi’s “life-book.” Like Ahkmatova and Celan before him, Aygi has left us with these most necessary words to dwell in—a quiet, spiritual poetry in a time of uprootedness and despair.

Child-And-Rose is a special collection of poems and prose chosen and arranged by Gennady Aygi and his translator, Peter France. Taking its central themes of childhood, sleep, and silence in relation to poetic creation, the book is divided into five sections: “Veronicas Book” (a cycle of poems about the first six months of his daughter’s life), “Sleep-And-Poetry,” “Before and After the Book,” “Silvia’s World,” and “Poetry-As-Silence”––all written between 1972 and 2002. Gennady Aygi is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost contemporary poets; his work has been translated into some twenty languages. In the late 1950s, Aygi was urged by Boris Pasternak and Nazim Hikmet to switch from writing in his mother tongue, Chuvash, to Russian. It was not until the 1960s that he was first published in Eastern Europe, and not until the late 1980s that his poems were allowed to be openly published in the Soviet Union and Chuvashia, an autonomous republic in the middle Volga valley where he was born in 1934. Images of Aygi’s Chuvash homeland––fields, forests, oaks, snow, birches, ravines––mingle amidst a disrupted syntax, astonishing turns, gaps, and suspensions that all speak to a quiet stillness of being. In Child-And-Rose, a rare, extraordinary spiritual communion with the world is made possible through poetry.

Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an outstanding figure, arguably the outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. This is a personal selection from the poetry — poems that for one reason or another I wanted to translate. I have tried to make it reasonably representative of different strands and periods in his work, with a certain stress on the brilliant and fragmentary Voronezh poems.”

The transparent one still sings to no avail, still swallow, Antigone, beloved girl …