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Muddy River

Selected Poems

Sergey Stratanovsky

Translated by J Kates

Muddy River
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Russian, Translation
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2016)
9781847772534
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • The Russian Russophobe rushes to the river – to drown
    (‘Fed up with living in this eternal vile squalor!’)
    But reconsiders: there is a choice – to emigrate,
    Or (variation on a theme): to express in hellishly
    Contemptuous verse his heartfelt, furious heat…


    From Russophobia

    Sergey Stratanovsky’s Muddy River is the first comprehensive English-language selection of a contemporary existentialist Russian master. Taken together, the poems express the full range of Stratanovsky’s verse, drawing on seven collections that represent half a century of writing. Muddy River is the essential Anglophone introduction to Stratanovsky’s oeuvre, its now satirical, now psalmic, ever-searching poetics.
    Sergey Stratanovsky
    Sergey  Stratanovsky was born in 1944 in Leningrad and educated in the department of Russian philology at Leningrad University. He began to write poetry in 1968, around the time of the Prague Spring and his graduation, though his early work subsisted in a culture of Soviet Union censorship. During this period ... read more
    J Kates
    J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for the Selected Poems ... read more
    '€˜It is very difficult in a few words to point to an unprecedented quality in Stratanovsky’s work. It seems to me that his particularity is not even in how it is expressed, but from where it is articulated, there where sound has its source. From somewhere terribly deep: in a time of faith and magic, where and when element and consciousness are not divided and continue to constitute a meaningful whole.'
    Mikhail Aizenberg
     'He does not paint in half-tones. The clash of clear, bright colors and sharp lines - this is his poetry.'
    Nikita Eliseev, Russian literary critic
    'This important collection by a meditative poet who is in, but not of, the world he has chronicled for almost half a century.'
    Boris Dralyuk, TLS
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