"If only you could read the original works of famous Russian poets, glimpse the uniqueness of such giants as Pushkin, Lermontov, Akhmatova, appreciate their finely crafted stanzas, feel their joy and sadness, despondency and optimism, hear the music of their voices. If only..." (from the back cover of the book).
"Echoes of the Russian verse" is written in English and is intended for those who love poetry. It is hoped that one can enjoy reading it without regard to the poems' source information. There are no biographical notes on the Russian poets, no comments or opinions on Russian poetry. There is only one type of information written in Russian that can be found in this book: the titles of the source poems. This is done for the sake of those few who might decide to locate the original Russian sources--a decision inspired by the author's own frustrating experiences of attempting to locate the original poems based on loosely translated titles and verses, both English-to-Russian and Russian-to-English.
This poetry collection is not systematic in any way. Simply, the author was internally compelled to present a few wonderful Russian poems in meaningful, poetic English. The poems in this book are written according to the author's self-imposed imperative to concurrently preserve the four key aspects of the source poems: the rhythm, the rhyming, the meanings and the feelings. These English poems are meant to be faithful representations--the echoes--of their claimed Russian sources so that the reader can, hopefully, get an idea of what the Russian poetic experience is all about.
This book highlights a very thin sliver of Russian poetry written between 1825 to 2000, just a few poems by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Tutchev, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Sasha Cherny, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ovsey Driz, Bulat Okudzhava, Eldar Ryazanov, Lev Khalif, Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Naum Sagalovsky, Alexander Kushner, Vladimir Visotsky, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Orlov.