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jeeleongkoh's review
4.0
I finished reading Natalya Gorbanevskaya's Selected Poems a while ago. She is a poet very much to my taste. Perhaps she is less passionate than Marina Tsvetaeva but she is intelligent, restrained and concise. She writes a poetry of clear statements, enlivened by surprising turns of thought or phrase. The translation by Daniel Weissbort does not reproduce her rhymes, but seems to have caught her directness. In Last Poems of the Last Century, she advises,
A citizen?
So, live independently.
A poet?
So, travel the world...
That tough matter-of-factness is very attractive. After arousing the ire of the Soviet authorities, she escaped to France and lived among the Russian emigre community in Paris. She lived there long enough to see the city change.
How few pinball machines now in Paris,
what's more, no smoking in cafés,
you screw up your eyes, like a half corpse,
insufficiently cooled.
A citizen?
So, live independently.
A poet?
So, travel the world...
That tough matter-of-factness is very attractive. After arousing the ire of the Soviet authorities, she escaped to France and lived among the Russian emigre community in Paris. She lived there long enough to see the city change.
How few pinball machines now in Paris,
what's more, no smoking in cafés,
you screw up your eyes, like a half corpse,
insufficiently cooled.
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