The Last Poet of the Village - by Sergei Yesenin (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

It is difficult to find a Russian person who doesn't know by heart at least one poem by Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925), whose distinctive lyricism and lush rural imagery have indelibly imprinted themselves into the Russian consciousness. Second in popularity among Russian speakers only to Alexander Pushkin, Yesenin has received surprisingly little attention abroad, where he is best known for his brief marriage to Isadora Duncan. This bilingual edition (original Russian side-by-side with translation by Anton Yakovlev) is an attempt to rectify the relative scarcity of Yesenin's English translations and to introduce English speakers to many of his most beloved and iconic poems.

Review Quotes

When Keats read George Chapman's translation of Homer, he felt like an astronomer when "a new planet swims into his ken." This is how I felt in reading Anton Yakovlev's superb translations of some poems by Sergei Yesenin. Yesenin is an icon of early 20th century Russian poetry, communicating the vastness of Russia as a country and a culture, but he is not well known in the Anglosphere. Yakovlev's translations strike this non-Russophone reader as a triumph of craft in combining a "peasant" simplicity that seems deeply and authentically Russian with piquant, always-tasteful touches of idiomatic American speech. These versions are a gift to readers of English in bringing across the quality and qualities of an original and unforgettable artist.

--Daniel Brown, author of Taking the Occasion and What More?

With this attentive selection of Yesenin's short lyrics, Yakovlev has given us something I thought impossible, an English Yesenin. Sergei Yesenin stands alongside Blok and Tsvetaeva in the pantheon of Russia's greatest lyric poets and, similar to them, has remained among the most untranslatable. Anton Yakovlev's conscientious handling of the elements of the craft, as well as his own substantial skill as a poet, manage to convey a palpable voice and persona for Yesenin, and persuade us he truly was a major poet.

--Alexander Cigale, translator of Russian Absurd: Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms

Anton Yakovlev's book of translations of Sergei Yesenin's poems is one of those serendipitous events the Universe still springs on us from time to time. In this case, a wonderful contemporary poet brings the words of an important Russian imaginist, who died in 1925, into the present, and in so doing, demonstrates his timelessness. He has Yesenin tell us: "Is it my fault that I'm a poet... / After all, it wasn't my choice-- / It's just the way I came into the world." And: "That 'poet' label won't kill me. / I'm a hooligan just like you." And: "If I hadn't been a poet, I probably would / Have been a thief and a conman." I couldn't put this one down--highly recommended!

--Ron Kolm, co-editor of From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream, and the author of A Change in the Weather