The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin
AUTHOR
Maxim Amelin
TRANSLATORS
Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher
The Joyous Science offers a comprehensive introduction to Maxim Amelin. The poems span Amelin’s long career and cover his many thematic concerns. A loving collector of neologisms and a devoted student of Revolutionary word-smithing (à la Mayakovsky), Amelin keeps his poetry in suspension through a tension of opposites. He writes of bodily pleasures while musing on the body’s resurrection. He is critical of Russia but loves its language. Riddles, odes, and elegies appear alongside a long poem, “The Joyous Science.” This 20-page mock epic chronicles the exploits―both real and imagined―of Jacob Bruce, an astronomer, alchemist, and military strategist to Peter the Great. Amelin is a unique force in contemporary Russian poetry.
Reviews
"Mong and Fisher have succeeded in finding a distinctive voice in English for Amelin, a poet steeped in the philosophical traditions and poetic culture of Russia. There is poetry in Mong and Fisher's translation, wrought in judicious and playful word choice, internal rhyme, and with a sensitive ear for song, sense, and soulfulness. There are even places where these translations equal or, perhaps, surpass the original in their crispness and linguistic innovation, making this collection not only a remarkable accomplishment of poetic translation but truly a pleasure to read."
– Cliff Becker Prize judges Diana Thow, Anthony Anemone and Joanna Trzeciak Huss
"Maxim Amelin's poems come to me with everything I need in certain moments, and nothing I do not: they bring God without consolation, history without meaning, irony without bitterness. Amelin is a poet who knows when to observe, when to question, when simply to delight in a fortuitous turn of phrase, and The Joyous Science offers us a modern Baroque, perfectly poised between music and wit, in translations that truly make English the poet's native language. An excellent book."
– Ben Paloff
Anne O. Fisher's translations of Ilf and Petrov's novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, as well as their 1936 travelogue Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, have been widely praised. Her translations of Andrey Platonov and Margarita Meklina have appeared in Cabinet Magazine and in the 2015 Norton anthology Flash Fiction International, while her translations of Ksenia Buksha are forthcoming in Cardinal Points and the St. Petersburg Review. Her translation of Buksha's novel, The Freedom Factory, is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. With her husband, poet Derek Mong, she has co-translated the poetry of Maxim Amelin; their work has appeared in Asymptote, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Lines, and elsewhere. In 2014 they published the first English-language interview with Amelin in Jacket2. Fisher is a recipient of translation grants from the NEH and NEA and lives in Indiana with her family. She has a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Michigan.
Derek Mong is the author of three poetry collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes, The Identity Thief, and When the Earth Flies into the Sun—and a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Free Inquiry, & the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxin Amelin (White Pine Press). Together they run the literary journal, At Length. A contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square, he lives with his family in Indiana where he chairs the English Department at Wabash College.
Poet, critic, editor, and translator, Maxim Amelin is among the last generation of Russian poets to grow up in the Soviet Union, or as the poet Aleksei Tsvetkov wrote in Poetry Magazine: "those in the thirty- to forty-year-old range... the children of perestroika--or one should say the orphans, since their alleged mother went missing long ago" (February 2008). The recipient of numerous national awards, including the Moscow Reckoning Award, the Anti-Booker, the Novyi Mir Prize, and the Bunin Prize, his work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2013 Amelin won the prestigious Solzhenitsyn Prize for his contributions to Russian poetry. The author of three books of poetry, including Cold Odes (Холодные оды, 1996), Dubia (1999), and The Horse of the Gorgon (Конь Горгоны, 2003), he recently published his collected poetry and prose, Bent Speech (Гнутая речь, 2011). An accomplished translator of Pindar, Catullus, Homer, and various contemporary poets, he currently lives in Moscow. He serves as editor-in-chief at OGI, a leading publisher of contemporary literature, and is a member of the Russian PEN-Club. He was born in Kursk.