Friday, June 3, 2011

Our new translations of Arseny Tarkovsky in Poetry Magazine



Thanks to the great poet Arseny Tarkovsky, and my co-translator Dimitri Psurtsev, for making these poems happen.  

Here's the opening of the essay on the translation:

Perhaps all translations are Frankenstein’s monsters. The main question then becomes: is the creature alive? We know that translations, like the monster, are a grab bag of other organs and skin, stolen from the graveyards of other traditions whose sensibilities are not always our own, grafted together into something that approximates a whole. But has the translator provided the lightning rod, gathered the electricity? In the end, does it breathe?


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