Peter the Great's African

“It is not enough to say that Gannibal’s great-grandson became a poet, even a great poet. Pushkin, it is often claimed, invented the Russian literary language itself.” —Jennifer Wilson, New York Review of Books

“Notably, all poetic sections appear in rhymed, metrical verse. It is challenging to produce iambic tetrameters in modern English that sound serious, let alone a worthy of Pushkin, yet these translators pull off a miracle, using a delicate combination of full and half-rhymes to prevent the magnificent poem that concludes ‘Egyptian Nights’ (155-157) from sounding like a children’s song. To translate a work in which the distinction between poetry and prose is central, however, this feat is indeed a necessary miracle.” —Emily Wang, Slavic and East European Journal

“Pushkin is everywhere.” —Elif Batuman

“The challenges of translating Pushkin are well known, and they have seldom met with such sure hands as those of Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.” —Judges of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Prize on The Captain’s Daughter

“As a bonus to this fine translation of ‘Dubrovsky,’ Robert Chandler includes ‘Egyptian Nights,’ Pushkin’s original mix of prose and verse… . Chandler shows that he is as gifted at translating verse as he is with prose.” —Donald Rayfield

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is considered Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His novel The Captain’s Daughter is available from NYRB Classics.

Robert Chandler has translated many NYRB Classics, including Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Stalingrad, as well as Andrey Platonov’s Soul and The Foundation Pit.

Boris Dralyuk’s most recent translations include Leo Tolstoy’s Lives and Deaths and Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. He is a translator of Maxim Osipov’s Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories and Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames, both published by NYRB Classics.

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