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Selected Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
 
 

Selected Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) (Paperback)

by Anna Akhmatova (Author), D.M. Thomas (Translator) "The pillow hot On both sides, The second candle Dying, the ravens Crying ..." (more)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (28 May 1992)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140186174
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140186178
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13 x 1.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 608,192 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Product Description

Brings together all D.M. Thomas' acclaimed translations of Akhmatova's poems. It includes "Requiem", her poem of the Stalinist Terror and "Poem Without a Hero".


About the Author

D. M. Thomas (1935) is an internationally published novelist,
poet, and translator. Born and raised in Cornwall, he studied Russian
during his national service and went on to read English at New College,
Oxford. He has lived and worked in Australia and the United States, and was
a teacher before he became a full-time writer. He is a prolific author, and
has published more than fifteen volumes of poetry, a similar number of
novels, and also has numerous translations of Russian poetry and a major
biography to his name. His work has international appeal, and has proved
especially popular in continental Europe and the US.

First and foremost a poet, D. M. Thomas has had poetry collections
published throughout his life, starting with Personal and Possessive
(1964), and including such well-known volumes as Two Voices (1968), Love
and Other Deaths (1975), The Honeymoon Voyage (1981), Dreaming in Bronze
(1981), winner of a Cholmondeley Award, Selected Poems (1983), and another
collection of new and selected poems, The Puberty Tree (1992). He has
collaborated with other pre-eminent poets on a number of collections, and
his most recent work is Dear Shadows (2004). It has been noted that his
poetry is greatly influenced by his love of Russian literature, and he has
translated the work of Akhmatova, Pushkin and Yevtushenko.

While his poetry has been widely acclaimed, it is for his progressive and
controversial novels that D. M. Thomas is probably best known. His unique
and fantastical novel, The White Hotel (1981), garnered massive critical
and popular attention, won the Los Angeles Times Fiction prize, the PEN and
Cheltenham prizes, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It has been
translated into over twenty languages worldwide, and plans for a film
adaptation have long circulated around Hollywood. His early novels include
The Flute-Player (1979), Birthstone (1980), and the five novels that make
up the `Russian nights' series: Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx
(1986), Summit (1987) and Lying Together (1990). Since then he has produced
Flying into Love (1992), Pictures at an Exhibition (1993), Eating Pavlova
(1994), and most recently, the novella Charlotte (2000). He has had a
selection of his memoirs published, called Memories and Hallucinations
(1988), and has also written Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century of his Life
(1998), scholarly and meticulously researched biography which was heralded
by a leading Solzhenitsyn scholar as "an extraordinary accomplishment... so
marvellously readable... in it I feel that Solzhenitsyn appears whole for
the first time".

D. M. Thomas currently lives in Truro, with his third wife, a dog and two
cats. He has a selection of grown-up children and step-children, and is
currently working on a new collection of poetry.


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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars an excellent introduction to a major Russian poet, 4 Mar 2001
By A Customer
This is a selection of Anna Achmatova's poetry spanning her whole writing career and starting in 1912. Although Russian history looms large in the background of these poems - many of those close to Akhmatova became victims of Stalinist terror - the atmosphere is not exclusively bleak in this collection. It also reveals her development as a poet and the diverse range of subjects she wrote about, from real-life events like the London Blitz in 'To The Londoners' written in 1940, to biblical figures and love poems. Dominating everything are the references to St Petersburg, the city she lived in for most of her life, and which forms the backdrop to what is probably the stand-out poem in this book, 'Poem Without A Hero'. Defining what it's 'about' is not easy - people and events in the city and in Russia over several decades, taking in references to censorship, political persecution and the Russian people, all skillfully woven together, is an approximate definition. How true it is to the original is impossible to say without a knowledge of Russian, but the translation certainly reads well, leaving you in no doubt that Akhmatova really was a great poet. The translator's notes at the back are also informative. This is a comprehensive and likable introduction to someone considered a major twentieth-century poet.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars correction, 7 Jul 2006
By D. M. Thomas "." (Cornwall, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
As the translator of the poems in this book, I cannot comment on the quality of translation, but Akhmatova is indeed a great poet. I do wish to correct the 'author's note'. I'm not Dylan Thomas! I'm the author of 'The White Hotel' and many other novels and collections of poetry.
By the way, my Akhmatova translations are now also available in the Everyman Pocket Poets series, with about twenty new translations.
D.M.Thomas
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "O My Son, My Terror!", 17 Oct 2008
Akhmatova was one of Russia's leading and most celebrated poets. Personally I gelled best with the poems written during Stalin's excesses and the second world war. "I'm not one of those who left their country for wolves to tear it limb from limb" she wrote. She stayed after the revolution and went through the privations and terror like everyone else. Later she lamented that "the souls of those I love are on high stars".

"Requiem" written largely for her son who was imprisoned by Stalin is heartbreaking. "They took you away at daybreak. Half waking as though at a wake, I followed." Later on she cries "O my son, my terror!". She spent 17 months waiting for him outside prison gates. And that's where standing in queues alongside others that she "learned how faces fall apart, How fear looks out from under the eyelids, How deep are the hieroglyphics cut by suffering on people's cheeks".
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