The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
10 best books like The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Robert Chandler): The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, The Selected Poems, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, Selected Stories, A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, Red Cavalry and Other Stories, Selected Poems
| Author | Gerald Moore |
| ISBN | 0141181001 |
I remember finding Noémia de Sousa online and then in a looseleaf literary piece while in Portugal. I had nothing but time in Portugal, so I sat at a cafe and slowly tried to translate her verse, using a portable Portuguese translator.
Canção fraterna
Irmão negro de voz quente
o...
| Author | Osip Mandelstam |
| ISBN | 1590170911 |
Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian poetry but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan...
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
| Author | Hồ Xuân Hương |
| ISBN | 1556591489 |
Hồ Xuân Hương — whose name translates as "Spring Essence" — is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risqué poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and...
| Author | Ingeborg Bachmann |
| ISBN | 0939010844 |
Darkness Spoken gathers together Ingeborg Bachmann’s two celebrated books of poetry, as well as early and late poems not collected in book form, over 100 of them appearing in English for the first time, as well as 25 poems never before published in German. Bachmann is considered one of the most important...
| Author | Nikolai Gogol |
| ISBN | 0140449078 |
Gogol's detailed, breathlessly sarcastic and mean spirited story telling is a joy to read.
Unfortunately some stories stop abruptly with no decent pay off for the gloriousness before it: The Carriage has an obvious and anti-climatic finale and The Government Inspector didn't finish as grandly...
| Author | Guy de Maupassant |
| ISBN | 0140448128 |
Set in the nouveau riche Paris of society women, prostitutes, and playboys; in the Normandy countryside; and on the French Riviera where Maupassant had lived, the thirty-four short stories in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant in French literature. They focus on the complexity...
Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest...
| Author | Isaac Babel |
| ISBN | 0140449973 |
Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish...
| Author | Charles Baudelaire |
| ISBN | 0140446249 |
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories...
| Author | Alan Dugan |
| ISBN | 1583225129 |
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his...
| Author | Alexander Pushkin |
| ISBN | 0375406727 |
Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...
| Author | Ryōkan |
| ISBN | 1590309820 |
Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir....
| Author | A.R. Ammons |
| ISBN | 0393321924 |
I haven't finished reading ALL the poems here, but am going to take a break for awhile (I've read almost one third, from various time periods in this collection). I forget how I stumbled upon this poet--I think he was quoted on an anarchist site that Lara sent me (believe it or not)--but he is one that I'll...
| Author | Paul Schmidt |
| ISBN | 1590171918 |
A New York Review Books Original
A master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in English
In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians,...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 0140439900 |
De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by...
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
| Author | Clifford Geertz |
| ISBN | 0520004590 |
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant...
The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
| Author | Anthony Thwaite |
| ISBN | 0141190949 |
Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic...
| Author | Paul Auster |
| ISBN | 0394717481 |
During the 20th Century, France was home to many of the world's greatest poets. This collection highlights some of the very best verse that came out of a country and century defined by war and liberation. Let Paul Auster guide you through some of the best poetry that 20th century France has to offer.
"Indispensable...
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary...
| Author | William Rees |
| ISBN | 0140423850 |
Non obtrusive prose translations and a fantastic selection. If you need a starting point for modern French poetry this is the place to go. Not only do you have a good selection from all of the most known poets but also a gateway into lesser known but very good poetry. Without this volume I would never have...
| Author | Geoffrey Hosking |
| ISBN | 0674781198 |
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation -- a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood....
| Author | Hafez |
| ISBN | 0143107283 |
Acclaimed translator Dick Davis breathes new life into the timeless works of three masters of fourteenth-century Persian literature.
Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the...
| Author | Ray Huang |
| ISBN | 1563247313 |
A (content-wise) interesting thematic history of China, albeit one that shows its age. It's too dry to be a popular history, but does too little to situate itself in within contemporaneous scholarship to be academic.
As its title suggests, Huang's book is a macro-level treatment of Chinese...
