Tickets for this talk at £7 (£5 for GB Russia members) are only available by email to: membership@gbrussia.org

Drinks from 6:30pm

Talk at 7pm

The recent Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinsky, contains the very best of Russian verse, much of it available in English for the first time.

Whether romantic, realistic, surreal, mocking or blackly comic, poetry has been at the heart of Russian life and culture for centuries. This new anthology presents Russian verse from the Golden Age of Pushkin and his contemporaries, through the symbolist Alexander Blok and the Soviet era, such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, as well as many less-known and modern works.

Robert and some of his fellow translators will present a selection of readings from this anthology and comment on the context, the authors, and the process of translating these verses.

Robert Chandler is one of the leading translators of Russian literature and has translated, to wide acclaim, prose and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, including works by Grossman, Platonov, Teffi and many others.