Far from Sodom

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDED TRANSLATION

in a translation by Daniel Weissbort that Elaine Feinstein describes in her illuminating introduction as 'clean, clear and … amazingly felicitous'. Lisnianskaya, an intensely lyrical poet, is first and foremost a love poet, and the love that she and her late husband, the celebrated poet Semyon Lipkin, had for one another colours – without the least sentimentality – many of Lisnianskaya's more recent poems. Indeed, her most recent collection consists partly of an elegy to him.

"Always – intensity of feeling, and a tranquillity
(rare) of the most profound sort. No artificiality,
no posing – total sincerity."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (of Lisnianskaya's poetry)

INNA LISNIANSKAYA was born in Baku in 1928 and her first poetry collection appeared in 1957. She is now recognised as one of Russia's leading female poets, a recipient of both the State Prize and the Solzhenitsyn Prize for her work. She lives in Moscow.

DANIEL WEISSBORT founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965 with the late Ted Hughes, and edited
it until 2004. He is Research Fellow at Kings College, London and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.