by Gennady Aygi (Author), Sarah Valentine (Translator)
Gennady Aygi's poems are as pleasurable for the uniqueness and clarity of their crafting as they are for the spirit they express.
and -- the fields -- rise -- into the sky
from each star -- there is -- a course
to every other -- star
Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is regarded as the Chuvash national poet. Relatively unpublished until the 1980s in the Soviet Union, he has been celebrated abroad, nominated for the Nobel Prize on multiple occasions, and translated into more than twenty languages.
Sarah Valentine is a poet and scholar who teaches at the University of California Riverside. This is her first book of translations.
Author Biography
Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He wrote and lived during times of extreme terror and suffering for the people of the Soviet Union and because of the repressive censorship, like many writers of his generation Aygi could only publish his work abroad, and even then at great peril to himself and the people who helped him smuggle his work out of the country.
Sarah Valentine's first book of translations, Into the Snow: Poems by Gennady Aygi (forthcoming from Wave Books, fall 2011), is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006). Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics. Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University. She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA. Sarah lives in Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.