The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry review – the importance of rhyme and reason

An ambitious anthology spanning 200 years is welcome – though some of the translators need to work on their rhyming

‘Offering readers a lively impression of the Byronic Pushkin’: the poet in Crimea, 1820. Photograph: Alamy

Carol Rumens

Sunday 2 August 2015  The Observer

This anthology is ambitious – in scope, biographical apparatus and in what it expects of its translators. Although the chronological arc is shorter than that of the granddaddy anthology, Dimitri Obolensky’s The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1965), which included medieval oral poetry and a pair of important 18th-century literary writers, Lomonosov and Sumarokov, the present editors generously represent and expand – in both directions – the Pushkin era and the 20th century. There are names in the 200-year constellation sprawling between Gavrila Derzhavin (1743-1818) and Marina Boroditskaya (1954-) that will be unfamiliar even to educated Russian readers.

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