Collected Poems and Translations
Elaine Feinstein's voice is clear, passionate and subtle. She writes about love, loss, jealousy and the pressures of living as mother and wife, drawing coherent shapes out of her own inner uncertainties, tenderly calling up an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films or a flowering cactus. Given her temperament, and her Russian-Jewish background, it is no wonder that her versions of Marina Tsvetaeva are celebrated, and that she brings such understanding to the translation of other Russian Writers – including Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz, and Bella Akhmadulina – and to Alexander Pushkin, whose biography she has written. Her landscape poems are always peopled, and the narrative and dramatic skills of a major novelist give an unexpected urgency to her evocation of classical and historic figures.
This "Collected Poems and Translations" is just that: work drawn from fourteen volumes of poems and translations published over thirty years.
About the Author
Elaine Feinstein is a poet, novelist, and biographer. She has received many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors', Wingate and Arts Council Awards, the Daisy Miller Prize for her experimental novel The Circle, (long-listed for the "lost" Man Booker prize in 2010) and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has travelled across the world to read her poems, and her books have been translated into most European languages; also Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, a New York Times Book of the Year, have remained in print since 1971. She was given a major grant from the Arts Council to write her most recent novel, The Russian Jerusalem, a phantasmagoric mix of prose and poetry (Carcanet, 2008). She has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow, as a judge for most of the current literary prizes, and as Chair of the Judges for the T. S. Eliot Award. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010.
