Second Nature: Poems

Description

In this collected volume of Pasternak's poetry Andrei Navrozov seeks to transport the English-language reader into the Russian poet's mysterious lyric universe. Both inventive and exact, the poems in Second Nature are inspired by life and soenery from the natural world. This essential volume retains the entertaining and controversial introduction by Andrei Navrozov which scandalised the literary columns when the book was first published in 1990. Second Nature has since been acclaimed by leading Pasternak scholars and enthusiasts.

Boris Pasternak famously refused the Nobel Prize, making himself a household name in the West. The award led to such pressure from the government that he was forced to decline the award, which led to his expulsion from the Writer's Union. Andrei Navrozov is an acclaimed writer, translator, and poet. He has recently completed a cultural and political portrait of contemporary Italy, Italian Carousel: Scenes of Internal Exile.

'Packed with feeling and intelligence.' - The Times; 'It seems to me that I can hear, as I have not done before, the voice of the poet Pasternak and really apprehend what he is doing with thought, feeling, language. It's an impressive and immensely moving piece of work; the poems, somehow, declare authenticity... These versions smell of honesty and come straight to the reader as though no intermediary had had a hand. How sad and beautiful they are! One would need a heart of stone not be moved by them.' - Charles Causley; 'Navrozov successfully recreates the convoluted exuberance of early Pasternak. [He] courageously renders Pasternak's heterogeneous lexical and musical mosaic - a central feature of his diction that led some of his contemporaries to maintain that this was simply un-Russian. The effect is more authentic than the efforts of most predecessors. Moreover, as a native speaker of Russian, his compromises to metre and orchestration are consciously made, and are not mere mistranslation.' - Christopher Barnes, author of Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography (CUP) 'Full of surprising, but not arbitrary, images drawn from Pasternak's sense of the fragmentation of modern life [Navrozov's versions] are inventive and exact in equal measure, the working parts of a poetry always packed with feeling and intelligence.' - Robert Nye, The Times 'Andrei Navrozov is an exception among present-day young poets. He is a true lyric poet.' - Josephine Pasternak 'Awe is scarcely too strong a word... [Navrozov's versions] have given me, for the first time, some notion of what Pasternak is like in the original.' - Roy Fuller