Time of gratitude / Gennady Aygi ; translated from the Russian by Peter France.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aĭgi, Gennadiĭ, 1934-2006, author.

Contributor:

France, Peter, 1935- translator.

Standardized Title:

Works. Selections. English (France)

Language:

English

Russian

Physical Description:

xv, 124 pages : illustration ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017.

Summary:

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 incentive 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." Book jacket.

Contents:

Russia and Chuvashia

Everyday miracle: meetings with Boris Pasternak (1956-1958)

Requiem before winter

Leaves

into a festive wind: for the centenary of Velimir Khlebnikov

Yes, Kruchonykh himself, or the least known of the most famous

Krch

80

Mayakovsky

In honor of a master

Kazimir Malevich

Massacre of a silk flag: on the portraits of Vladimir Yakovlev

Poems for Vladimir Yakovlev

An evening with Shalamov

Degree: of stability

A snowdrop in the storm: on Mikhail Sespel

Henceforth by Mikhail Sespel

The wider world

O yes: light of Kafka

For a conversation about K.

to Olga Mashkova

For a long time: into whisperings and rustlings (once more

In memory of Paul Celan)

Reading Norwid

Baudelaire

O yes: the smile of Max Jacob

René Char

Field: in the full blaze of winter

On the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer.

Notes:

"New Directions paperbook original."

Collection of poems and essays.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 117-124).

ISBN:

9780811227193

0811227197

OCLC:

975122334