Max Hayward Books

Hope Against Hope recounted the last four years in the life of the great Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, and gave a hair-raising account of Stalin's terror. Hope Abandoned complements that earlier masterpiece, and in it Nadezhda Mandelstam describes their life together from 1919, and her own after Mandelstam's death in a labour camp in 1938. She also sets out his system of values and beliefs, and provides striking portraits of many of their contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and their champion till his own downfall, Nikolai Bukharin, as well as an astonishingly candid picture of Anna Akhmatova.

This modern classic by Boris Pasternak follows the events of the Russian Revolution and of life in the young Soviet Union up to about 1939. The story is a personal account, illustrated mostly by the effects of the Revolution on the main character in the novel, Yury Zhivago. We follow the changes in Zhivago's life, and the lives of those whom he comes in contact. So it is more than a historical report - it is a very human novel.

Collection includes conversations with Willard Trask, John Hollander, Herbert Mason, Ben Belitt, Richard Wilbur, Robert Fitzgerald, Max Hayward, Edmund Keeley, Octavio Paz, Michael Hamberger, Christopher Middleton. Twelve distinguished translators share their thoughts on the art and practice of literary translation in this lively series of interviews. Although the common subject is the translation of poetry, the conversations range across a field of related topics: how each person got started as a translator, how each goes about the work, the qualities that distinguish a great translation from a merely serviceable one, the theoretic issues posed by poetic translation, the barriers of culture and time, the practical details of rendering a poem from one language to the next. --University of Massachusetts Press.

English, Russian (translation)