About the Author

Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) was born in Moscow and emigrated to Berlin in 1922. In addition to the five collections of poems he published between 1908 and 1927, Khodasevich was the author of a biography of the poet Gavrila Derzhavin and of numerous essays. He was married to the novelist Nina Berberova.

Peter Daniels is a winner of the 2008 Arvon and 2010 TLS Poetry Competitions. His collection Counting Eggs was published in 2012.

Michael Wachtel is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of The Development of Russian Verse, Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry and other books.

Reviews

Vladislav Khodasevich is one of the great undiscovered poets of the twentieth century. His verse is inventive, sharp and sensuous, full of the pain of exile yet suffused with hope and belief in the redemptive power of poetry. The greatest compliment to Peter Daniels is that his translations capture not only the semantic content, but the rhythm and the soul of Khodasevich s art. Martin Sixsmith, author of "Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East"
Khodasevichs best poems have the spicy bitternessof the later Yeats. This note is evident in Peter Daniels admirable versions, whichcombine accuracy and fidelity, yet still manage to read like real poems written in English. Ruth Fainlight, author of "Sugar-Paper Blue"
Meticulous and elegant. Daniels has found a voice and a tone in English which is as sophisticated and urbane as Khodasevich s own. These translations have the same classical restraint and sense of lyrical melancholy as the original poems; I hope they bring Khodasevich s poetry the wider attention it deserves. Sasha Dugdale, author of "Red House"
Not reading Russian, I m grateful to Peter Daniels for these clear, resourceful, metrical translations of Khodasevich. Given Nina Berberova s portrait of the man in her fine-grained memoir, and Nabokov s startling estimate of him as the greatest of twentieth-century Russian poets, I was eager to get a sense of his achievement. Here he is, the reinventor of Pushkin, alert, reticent, his acute powers of observation inflected with a wry melancholy. Alfred Corn, author of "The Poem s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody""

"Vladislav Khodasevich is one of the great undiscovered poets of the twentieth century. His verse is inventive, sharp and sensuous, full of the pain of exile yet suffused with hope and belief in the redemptive power of poetry. The greatest compliment to Peter Daniels is that his translations capture not only the semantic content, but the rhythm and the soul of Khodasevich's art." --Martin Sixsmith, author of "Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East"
"Khodasevichs best poems have the spicy bitterness of the later Yeats. This note is evident in Peter Daniels' admirable versions, which combine accuracy and fidelity, yet still manage to read like real poems written in English." --Ruth Fainlight, author of "Sugar-Paper Blue"
"Meticulous and elegant. Daniels has found a voice and a tone in English which is as sophisticated and urbane as Khodasevich's own. These translations have the same classical restraint and sense of lyrical melancholy as the original poems; I hope they bring Khodasevich's poetry the wider attention it deserves." --Sasha Dugdale, author of "Red House"
"Not reading Russian, I'm grateful to Peter Daniels for these clear, resourceful, metrical translations of Khodasevich. Given Nina Berberova's portrait of the man in her fine-grained memoir, and Nabokov's startling estimate of him as the greatest of twentieth-century Russian poets, I was eager to get a sense of his achievement. Here he is, the reinventor of Pushkin, alert, reticent, his acute powers of observation inflected with a wry melancholy." --Alfred Corn, author of "The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody"