Old Songs: Poems

by Olga Sedakova, Martha M F Kelly (Translator)

Overview

FINALIST, 2024 PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION

"Olga Sedakova is a writer of global significance. . .the publishing of this collection is a welcome stage in the reception of her exceptional genius in the West." So writes Rowan Williams in his foreword to this translation of Old Songs.

Born in Moscow in 1949, Olga Sedakova emerged as a leading writer of the late Soviet period. Since 2014, she has been an outspoken critic of Russia's war on Ukraine. Her writing bears witness to the values of generosity, attention, and non-violence. The poems in Old Songs construct a world shaped by these values, forming a lyric sequence infused with folk wisdom and anchored in moral courage. It is a world brought into being by song, the kind passed down over cradles and on walks through the garden. These poems find their way into your memory and accompany you on your way.

Sedakova is not only one of Russia's most revered contemporary poets but also a scholar and essayist. Often compared to figures such as Czeslaw Milosz, she has, with this volume (according to Rowan Williams), succeeded in "conveying the sense of a forgotten directness of perception and relation-not a lost simplicity, exactly, but a larger and more human world. . . ."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639821419
Publisher:	Slant Books
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Olga Sedakova is an internationally recognized poet and thinker. Emerging out of the late Soviet Underground, she has gone on to become a voice of conscience in the post-Soviet era. Sedakova is the recipient of many awards, including Russia's Andrei Bely Prize. Her poems engage diverse modes, from the folkloric to the metaphysical, and reflect an ethic and aesthetic grounded in Russian cultural tradition and informed by a "longing for world culture" (Osip Mandelstam).

Martha M. F. Kelly is associate professor of Russian at the University of Missouri. She is author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetics (Northwestern University Press, 2016). Her literary translations and essays have appeared in Two Lines, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry Daily, and Lit Hub. She is currently working on a book, "Olga Sedakova, Russian Icon, or The Poet on the Stove at the Center of the Cosmos."

Editorial Reviews

In these exceptionally fine translations, Martha M.F. Kelly has achieved her aim of conveying "a sense of words worn down as smooth as a river rock." One hears English words anew here, as well as the musical beauty and glorious wisdom of Sedakova's poetry. To have Old Songs in this new version is a gift.

--Stephanie Sandler, Harvard University

In these elegantly shaped and deliciously allusive utterances, Sedakova interrogates the puzzlement of the human heart-her heart? every human heart? the heart of the invisible but suspected God? With a signature and profoundly audible voice--which is in turns comic, in turns tragic, in turns aching with perplexity--these poems are united by a rare combination of humility, candor, and confidence, and by a deep, bass note of joy undergirding their claims on my heart as well.

- -Scott Cairns, author of Anaphora and Lacunae

It is excellent that Olga Sedakova has found in Martha M.F. Kelly such a careful, skilled, and sympathetic translator.

--Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, author of Looking East in Winter

From the Publisher