The Daily Glance
Don Mager’s US Four Plus Four is a unique book of translation. I have been focusing solely on living writers in these daily glances, but this collection has been staring at me from a shelf for two years. I’ve taken it down occasionally and read bits and pieces; still, going through the entire collection at once was a striking experience, for Mager has put together a chronological book in which the poets write dedicatory pieces to each other (or after one of them has passed away). Mager gives the dates of the poems, and in-between sections he gives us brief biographical notes on the writers. He translated the following poets: Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel’shtam, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Maiakovskii, and Igor’ Severianin. I have read work by all but Esenin and Severianin in the past, and this book does not change my opinion on my favorites in the bunch, but it does radically alter the way I see them in connection with each other. Honestly, reading the anthology as a whole is like watching a historical movie told in poetry. In some ways, it makes me wish that Mager had written a collective biography of the eight to accompany this book. That, of course, would be a huge undertaking, but after reading the poems in this collection, I think it would be a worthwhile one.
Comments