209–10 This our tale […] our youth: The censor, fearful of any possible political allusions, removed these lines too on first publication.
Acknowledgements
For their critical comments on a number of drafts of translations for this book, I am especially grateful to Angela Livingstone and Peter France, always generous with their time, whether spare or not; and as ever, to my wife Hazel, whose sure ear for spoken language has often guided me.
I am also grateful to Alla Gelich and Masha Karp, ready providers of sound advice on anything put to them; to Boris Dralyuk and Svetlana Pike, who responded to appeals for critical readings with energetic thoroughness; to Alyssa Dinega Gillespie, who gave me a master class on the ‘Stone Island cycle’ of lyric poems and from whose seminal article on these poems I have liberally quoted in my endnotes; to J. Douglas Clayton, who put me right on Pushkin’s use of the elegiac couplet; to Sonia Ketchian, who drew my attention to the remarkable Princess Anna Abamelek and Pushkin’s album poem to her; and to Michael Wachtel for helpful correspondence, and whose book (see Further Reading) has deepened my understanding of Pushkin’s poems in both literary and autobiographical contexts and which has often been my authority in annotation.
I should also like to express my gratitude to Jessica Harrison of Penguin for taking this book on and her encouragement and support throughout its progress; to Kate Parker for her imaginative curiosity and meticulous contribution to its editorial preparation; and to two most vigilant proofreaders, Anthony Hippisley and Stephen Ryan, the former especially for his input on consistency and the latter for his inescapable eye in the checking of a great variety of quotations.
At an early stage in working on translations of Pushkin, I was given memorable encouragement by the late Ed Hogan of Zephyr Press, then in Boston, and at a later date by the late Stanley Mitchell, who led me to significantly improve my version of The Gypsies.
*
My translations of The Gypsies, The Bridegroom, Count Nulin, The Dead Princess and the Seven Champions and The Tale of the Golden Cockerel first appeared in The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2006) and are included in the present book, with revisions, by kind permission of the original publishers.
The translation of Parts One and Two of The Bronze Horseman first appeared in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 2015), and of ‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ and ‘Elegy’ in Cardinal Points, vol. 7 (2017).
Earlier versions of the following translations of lyric poems first appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, New Series, no. 15 (1999): ‘To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff’, ‘O. Masson’, ‘I went alone before the dawn’, ‘To ***’ (‘It comes to me again, that moment’), ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’, ‘Winter Evening’, ‘Confession’, ‘The Prophet’, ‘Winter Road’, ‘Raven flies to raven’, ‘City of splendour, city of poor’, ‘From Hafiz’, ‘Madonna’, ‘Invocation’, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, ‘Autumn (A fragment)’, ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ and ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’.
Passages from Alyssa Dinega Gillespie’s article ‘Sidestepping Silence, Ventriloquizing Death: A Reconsideration of Pushkin’s Stone Island Cycle’, Pushkin Review, vol. 6–7 (2003–4), pp. 39–83, are quoted in the Notes by permission of the author and Slavica Publishers, Indiana University.
A passage from Russian Views of Pushkin, ed. and tr. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell (Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976), is quoted in the Introduction by permission.
A.W.
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This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2020
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Selected Poetry (Penguin) Page 30
