"Most of the lyrics in this volume are true to themselves as English poems and a nearly astonishing percentage are absolutely faithful, as well, to the Russian originals. . . .The Berlin Wall is as nothing compared to the linguistic boundaries separating East and West. The translations in this volume testify to a long-lasting love affair with these boundaries which has borne rich fruit." --Joseph Brodsky

An old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fiance and herself. Her story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the 'Lady of Shalott.' Tennysons's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its 'shadows' in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed; the peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement. The modern story Stallworthy traces over the ghostly outline of the old points a parable about one function...

Witness to the international and domestic chaos of the first half of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova (1888-1966) chronicled Russia's troubled times in poems of sharp beauty and intensity. Her genius is now universally acknowledged, and recent biographies attest to a remarkable resurgence of interest in her poetry in this country. Here is the essence of Akhmatova - a landmark selection and translation, including excerpts from "Poem with a Hero."

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) had a life that spanned prerevolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained a restrained, graceful, yet muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat, or the heart, at a moment's notice. Her themes include romantic yearning and frustration, the pull of the sensory, the emotional power of the mundane, and her belief that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia. By reputation, both Akhmatova's poems and the poet herself are defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, and she is for many the quintessential...