Research Catalog

Title

The diving bell : poems / by Elena Ignatova ; translated from Russian by Sibelan Forrester.

Author

Ignatova, Elena.

Publication

Brookline, MA : Zephyr Press, c2006.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Forrester, Sibelan E. S. (Sibelan Elizabeth S.)

Description

xv, 131 p.; 21 cm.

Summary

• "Elena Ignatova was born in Leningrad in 1947. She became an artistic dissident with regard to the hopelessly compromised literary establishment, but never joined the more alienated literary "underground." She published in samizdat until the appearance of her only officially recognized book, Teplaia zemliia (The Warm Earth) in 1989. In 1990, Ignatova and her family moved to Israel, where she has worked as a screenwriter of cultural documentaries. Her poetry exists in a tense balance between her former life in Russia, particularly in the St. Petersburg that was Leningrad, and her subsequent life and its perspectives in Jerusalem. In the last decade it contrasts the new, ancient environs of Jerusalem, described as crystalline and thus distinct from St. Petersburg's characteristic granite, a more chaotically igneous material.^
• Her work draws attention to the tragic disharmony between the way things are and the way they should be. Russian history flashes a dark side from the days of Prince Igor or the Mongol invasions, through the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible, to the Revolution, the Second World War, and beyond. Recent poems reflect current realities from Chernobyl to the current wars in Asia. Poetry then is the "diving bell" of her title, protecting the poet as well as her readers in a hostile, often toxic environment. It becomes a source of values and ways to approach and understand experience, while still depicting the flaws and compromises of human beings who live in an imperfect world."--Publisher's website.
• Ignatova says, "I am convinced that art is active: it can reflect the destruction of the world, of the historical connections of eras, of the human soul--or, on the contrary, can strengthen those connections. I have always wanted to write about the internal connection, the harmony of the world even in difficult times, about the connection of the past with our own fates, about Russia, about the connections of spaces: of the world of the Russian village, where I passed my childhood, of St. Petersburg and the Holy Land." Ignatova's work mobilizes remnants of old poetic solemnity, religious, official or even folk locutions, along with Soviet officialese and conversational vocabulary. Her earlier poetry tends to be formally looser and more experimental, but her mature work is much more classical. Thus, her distinctive voice feels familiar, or better, familial, to a reader who knows her predecessors: she consciously continues their tradition in this and other ways.^

Series Statement

In the grip of strange thoughts

Uniform Title

• In the grip of strange thoughts.
• Poems. Selections. English & Russian

Alternative Title

Poems.

Subject

Ignatova, Elena > Translations into English

Genre/Form

Translations

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Language (note)

• Poems in Russian and English translation.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Brass-lipped music of autumn ... -- Almost from the onset of September ... -- A careless sculpture's face ... -- This sorrowful and splendid world ... -- In memory of a friend -- December -- And of Russian verse ... -- When a downpour splashes the village ... -- Verses of my son -- Sudak -- Lot's wife -- You can spend a century reading Herodotus ... -- So you too are coming back to the blessed land ... -- I swear by the pipe of Marsyas ... -- Here where I live and on life's whetstone ... -- Here's a Malachite ring ... -- In unhappy love there is an excess of light ... -- Byzantine indigo ... -- Our holiday fortune-telling ... -- I'll never manage to bring back the quail in the fields ... -- We drove out of the forest ...

ISBN

• 0939010852 (alk. paper)
• 9780939010851

LCCN

^^2006011972

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library