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Criança e Rosa
A presente antologia dá-nos a ler uma das vozes mais representativas do modernismo russo. Expectavelmente silenciada pela União Soviética pré-Perestroyka, a dicção de Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) foi, desde cedo, na verdade tão cedo quanto 1953, sintomaticamente o ano da morte de Estaline, influenciada pelo peso literário e humano do seu amigo Boris Pasternak, que aquele conhecera ao mudar-se para estudar literatura em Moscovo, quando admitido na colónia de escritores de Peredelkino.
Originário da província soviética da Chuváchia, Aygi acabou, eventualmente, e por influência do próprio Pasternak, por abandonar a sua língua tradicional chuvache, de raiz turcomana, passando a escrever em russo, apesar de nunca ter perdido os laços afectivos com a sua região natal, chegando, pelo contrário, a traduzir vários autores para chuvache e a organizar uma antologia de poetas chuvaches.
Do Prefácio, Daniel Jonas
JARDIM – LUTO
é
(talvez)
o vento
que embala – tão gentil
(para a morte)
o coração
Gennady Aygi
Originário da província soviética da Chuváchia, Aygi acabou, eventualmente, e por influência do próprio Pasternak, por abandonar a sua língua tradicional chuvache, de raiz turcomana, passando a escrever em russo, apesar de nunca ter perdido os laços afectivos com a sua região natal, chegando, pelo contrário, a traduzir vários autores para chuvache e a organizar uma antologia de poetas chuvaches.
Do Prefácio, Daniel Jonas
JARDIM – LUTO
é
(talvez)
o vento
que embala – tão gentil
(para a morte)
o coração
Gennady Aygi
- GenresPoetry
232 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
6 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Gennady Aygi
23 books7 followersGennady Nikolaevich Aygi (Russian: Геннадий Николаевич Айги, Chuvash: Геннадий Николаевич Айхи; 21 August 1934 - 21 February 2006, Moscow) was a Chuvash poet and a translator. His poetry is written both in Chuvash and in Russian. Aygi is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He was born in Chuvashia, then a Soviet Republic, and moved to Moscow in 1953 to study at the Literary Institute. Though Aygi's poetry was not published in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, his work was widely translated and he received numerous honors, including multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 19, 2024
Tive muita dificuldade em sentir conexão com a escrita de Gennady Aygi. Na maioria das vezes, tive dificuldade em compreender o significado dos seus textos e decifrar o seu objetivo. Talvez daqui a uns anos, quando reler, tudo faça sentido, mas, por agora, ainda é muito desconexo.
June 17, 2025
a poetics of silence (nice to read this so close to having read a Blanchot novel in a way). This seems to be the thing people really nail down when writing about Aygi, very few critical studies however mention his wonderful sense of humour. "Mouse Gone" i think may rank among my favourite compositions (which is to say visually how the poem appears on the page, its sculptural element), and the poem itself is essentially a punchline.
October 6, 2008
CHILD-AND-ROSE is a selection of the verse of Gennady Aigi translated by Peter France. Aigi (1934-2006) was one of the major writers of the Soviet avant-garde, writing Russian-language verse of powerful but somehow alien insight greatly inspired by his Chuvash heritage. Among Aigi's output, which ranges from meditations on the horror of Soviet authority to reminisces of Chuvash traditional culture, a few books were dedicated mainly to themes of childhood and innocence. France has collected here "Veronica's Book", "Sleep-and-Poetry", "Before and After the Book", "Silvia's World" and "Poetry-As-Silence", all written between 1972 and 2002.
Bei Dao has contributed a preface expressing his own appreciation of Aigi, showing that in spite of Aigi's particular background he wrote poetry that is meaningful to readers internationally. Peter France's foreword contains a brief biography of Aigi and then explains the difficulty of translating Aigi by commenting on his poem "Krug" and France's English rendering "The Circle". The poems then follow. It is a real pity that this edition does not contain the original Russian alongside the English translation, as in the earlier SELECTED POEMS. Nonetheless, New Directions has printed and bound the book beautifully, with a lovely cover design and a portrait of Aigi by Gennadii Gogoliuk.
"Veronica's Book" was written in the few years after the birth of his first daughter in 1983, and the poems are a celebration of nascent femininity, with glimpses back to the life of Aigi's mother and more remote ancestors. There is genuinely moving poetry is here, such as "Beginning of the 'The Period of Likeness'", which opens with "and the forces / of the tribe are stirred --- and they float / and turn like wind-and-light --- carrying over your face / cloud after cloud: all expressions / of vanished faces". Nonetheless, I must admit I prefer Aigi's other poetry to this often saccharine delight in being a father. "Silvia's World" is similarly lightweight, a little work consisting of 32 isolated lines on the life of a young girl in Paris who gave up her room to Aigi when the poet stayed with her family. Some of these are quite amusing.
The book contains furthermore 37 of Aigi's more typical poems. These spans from the 1970s to 2002 and we find classics like the awesome "Now there are always snows" (Teper' vsegda snega), though the English translation here is only one of infinite possibilities as the Russian original is ambiguous in its parsing.
Two short works of prose are found here. "Notes on Sleep and Poetry" is a collection of 40 brief musings written over a span of four days in January 1975, while "Poetry-as-Silence" followed after it. The fragments herein are occasionally hermetic, but generally amount to a clearly understandable metaphysical manifesto of Aigi's poetry, rather comparable to Char's "Feuillets d'Hypnos" or Tafdrup's "Over vandet gaar jeg". In the ninth passage of "Sleep and Poetry", Aigi writes "Poetry has no ebb and flow. It *is*, it *abides*. Even if you take away its 'social' efficacy, you cannot take away its living, human fullness, profundity, autonomy."
Because of the lightweight nature of "Veronica's Book" and "Silvia's World", and the lack of the original Russian against a facing-page translation, I'll give this three stars. I'd daresay that a better introduction to Aigi, for those who don't yet know his work, would be the SELECTED POEMS volume.
Bei Dao has contributed a preface expressing his own appreciation of Aigi, showing that in spite of Aigi's particular background he wrote poetry that is meaningful to readers internationally. Peter France's foreword contains a brief biography of Aigi and then explains the difficulty of translating Aigi by commenting on his poem "Krug" and France's English rendering "The Circle". The poems then follow. It is a real pity that this edition does not contain the original Russian alongside the English translation, as in the earlier SELECTED POEMS. Nonetheless, New Directions has printed and bound the book beautifully, with a lovely cover design and a portrait of Aigi by Gennadii Gogoliuk.
"Veronica's Book" was written in the few years after the birth of his first daughter in 1983, and the poems are a celebration of nascent femininity, with glimpses back to the life of Aigi's mother and more remote ancestors. There is genuinely moving poetry is here, such as "Beginning of the 'The Period of Likeness'", which opens with "and the forces / of the tribe are stirred --- and they float / and turn like wind-and-light --- carrying over your face / cloud after cloud: all expressions / of vanished faces". Nonetheless, I must admit I prefer Aigi's other poetry to this often saccharine delight in being a father. "Silvia's World" is similarly lightweight, a little work consisting of 32 isolated lines on the life of a young girl in Paris who gave up her room to Aigi when the poet stayed with her family. Some of these are quite amusing.
The book contains furthermore 37 of Aigi's more typical poems. These spans from the 1970s to 2002 and we find classics like the awesome "Now there are always snows" (Teper' vsegda snega), though the English translation here is only one of infinite possibilities as the Russian original is ambiguous in its parsing.
Two short works of prose are found here. "Notes on Sleep and Poetry" is a collection of 40 brief musings written over a span of four days in January 1975, while "Poetry-as-Silence" followed after it. The fragments herein are occasionally hermetic, but generally amount to a clearly understandable metaphysical manifesto of Aigi's poetry, rather comparable to Char's "Feuillets d'Hypnos" or Tafdrup's "Over vandet gaar jeg". In the ninth passage of "Sleep and Poetry", Aigi writes "Poetry has no ebb and flow. It *is*, it *abides*. Even if you take away its 'social' efficacy, you cannot take away its living, human fullness, profundity, autonomy."
Because of the lightweight nature of "Veronica's Book" and "Silvia's World", and the lack of the original Russian against a facing-page translation, I'll give this three stars. I'd daresay that a better introduction to Aigi, for those who don't yet know his work, would be the SELECTED POEMS volume.
February 5, 2017
"Bed Time
in my back I feel always
a heaviness "you have gone"
you drop off (and I start to doze
like some kind of sorrowful
"part")
"
----
"Recognition of the Name
whirl of feelings perhaps
(like vertigo)
before consciousness
(as before a mirror):
with some power of sight gleams
and disappears
like some imprisoned shade
the shy - with quiet pauses
babble
of something"
in my back I feel always
a heaviness "you have gone"
you drop off (and I start to doze
like some kind of sorrowful
"part")
"
----
"Recognition of the Name
whirl of feelings perhaps
(like vertigo)
before consciousness
(as before a mirror):
with some power of sight gleams
and disappears
like some imprisoned shade
the shy - with quiet pauses
babble
of something"
December 29, 2020
Magnífico!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews