An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets

Edited by Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort

288 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 2005
$49.95 cloth, 0-87745-947-9, 978-0-87745-947-7
$24.95 paper, 0-87745-948-7, 978-0-87745-948-4

Based on an exhaustive review of Russian poetry, An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets is the first comprehensive collection of its kind. Editors Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort read some one thousand collections and manuscripts and thoroughly surveyed the vibrant Russian literary Internet, gathering works by women poets from Moscow to Vladivostok, those living abroad, and those domiciled in former republics of the Soviet Union. The resulting anthology presents English translations of works by more than eighty poets.

Focusing on the middle generation, with major figures such as Olga Sedakova, Svetlana Kekova, Vera Pavlova, and Tatyana Shcherbina, the collection also includes work by the youngest generation—born after 1970 and not yet known outside of Russia—as well as senior poets such as Bella Akhmadulina and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Translators include such poets as Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Carol Rumens, and Daniel Weissbort as well as Russianists and scholars Peter France, Catriona Kelly, Robert Reid, and Stephanie Sandler.

A significant and extensive bibliography lists the major works of prominent Russian women poets. A preface by Stephanie Sandler, a concluding note by Dmitry Kuzmin on the online Vavilon project, a postface by Elena Fanailova, and biographical notes on the poets and translators complete the anthology, which is sure to be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian literature.

Valentina Polukhina is professor emeritus at Keele University. She specializes in modern Russian poetry and is the author of several major studies of Joseph Brodsky and editor of bilingual collections of the poetry of Olga Sedakova, Dmitry Prigov, and Evegeny Rein. Daniel Weissbort is cofounder, along with Ted Hughes, and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and honorary professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Co-editor of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (Iowa, 1992), he is also the translator of more than a dozen books, editor of numerous anthologies, and author of many collections of his own poetry. His forthcoming books include a historical reader on translation theory, a book on Ted Hughes and translation, and an edited collection of selected translations of Hughes.

Poetry