Gennady Aygi: Into the Snow — Selected Poems

Description

Translated by Sarah Valentine. Wave Books (paperback, 2011)

Publisher Marketing: 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 was the Chuvash national poet, and is widely considered one of the great Russian language poets of the second half of the 20th century, alongside luminaries like Akhmatova, Mayakovsky and Pasternak. Though Aygi’s work is celebrated abroad, he is lesser known in the US; this work is a necessary contribution to the canon.

Valentine writes, “Much of Aygi’s poetry is written against darkness, against institutionalized evil, against our tendency to constantly undermine our own humanity and the humanity of our fellows through violence, nationalism, propaganda, and war. His weapon is the exuberance and joy of the poetic act, the ability of language to transform and transfigure a world of inhumanity and suffering into a world of humanity and peace.”

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