Endarkenment: Selected Poems

by Eugene Ostashevsky (editor), Eugene Ostashevsky (Editor), Lyn Hejinian (Translation)

Major collection by a contemporary Russian avant-garde masterThe poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko's writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language―although "perpetually incomplete" and shifting in meaning―remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet's Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko's work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications.

Genres: Poetry, Russia

178 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad and then immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old where they settled in New York City.

Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.

His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.

He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.