Angel Classics

Red Spectres: Russian 20th-century Gothic-fantastic tales

Various — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:55:40 +0000

Russian writers from Pushkin to Bulgakov and beyond have produced outstanding ghost stories, supernatural thrillers, and other tales of the uncanny. In the first decades of the 20th century the Gothic-fantastic genre flourished in Russia, despite official efforts to stamp it out. Few of these stories have been translated or published outside Russia. This collection includes eleven vintage tales by seven writers of the period: Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Grin and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; the lesser known but important figure Aleksandr Chayanov, whose story ‘Venediktov’ influenced Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita; and the émigrés Georgy Peskov and Pavel Perov. All but two of the stories appear for the first time in English.

At a time of revolution and civil war, hardship and deprivation, the supernatural genres provided means for a number of Russian writers to explore the dark underside of the machine age and the new political order. Through the traditional Gothic repertoire of ghosts, insanity, obsession, retribution and terror, they convey the turbulence and dissonance of life in Russia in these years.

Phaedra with New Year’s Letter and other poems

Marina Tsvetaeva — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:39:38 +0000

Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse drama Phaedra is perhaps the most extraordinary of all literary treatments of the Phaedra legend. It is primarily about female passion, and its most powerful figures are the female ones. Dangerously high voltage runs through all of them – Phaedra herself; her Nurse from childhood; and even the offstage Antiope, Amazon queen and mother of the young hunter Hippolytus (son of Phaedra’s husband Theseus) with whom Phaedra falls in love and who represents a powerful counterforce of chastity.

Phaedra, completed in 1927, is written with sustained emotional pressure throughout its nearly two thousand short but saturated lines and its shimmering variations of rhythm, rhyme and assonance. Angela Livingstone has translated this little-known great work for the first time into English, with the same brilliance that prompted an American translator to call her version of Tsvetaeva’s Ratcatcher ‘the very pinnacle of the art of translation’.

Three long poems written at the same time as Phaedra are included along with the main work. Their depth of thought and feeling connects with Tsvetaeva’s intense epistolary relationship with Pasternak and Rilke, and fascinatingly fills out the themes and preoccupations of Phaedra. Angela Livingstone’s translations of these poems also appear for the first time in book form.

The translator’s introduction and editorial matter, including a glimpse of the original in her note on translating Phaedra, enhance the reader’s appreciation of this work, so strongly characteristic of its author.

‘No more passionate voice ever sounded in Russian poetry of the twentieth century.’
Joseph Brodsky on Marina Tsvetaeva

Poems

Georg Heym — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:25:38 +0000

January 2012 marks the centenary of the death, by drowning at the age of 24, of one of the major figures of early German modernism – the poet and short story writer Georg Heym, a member of the brilliant ‘Expressionist’ generation that included the painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Wassili Kandinsky and the young poets who were to die in the First World War like Alfred Lichtenstein, Ernst Stadler and Georg Trakl.

Heym’s often explosive and shocking images are contained in verse of strict classical form and metre, giving it a thrilling tension and force. One of his most famous poems, ‘War’, contains the line ‘A mighty city sank in yellow smoke’ – a premonition of the Second World War and beyond, written before the First. Such is Heym’s apocalyptic contribution to the line of ‘city’ poetry from Baudelaire to T.S. Eliot.

First published by Libris in 2004, Antony Hasler’s is the fullest selection of his verse to appear in English. It is now distributed by Angel Classics.

‘Hasler has achieved, not complete rhymes, but satisfying assonances, and has built his translations round them, preserving Heym’s meaning with astonishing fidelity. His renderings, printed opposite the original texts, serve as perfect examples of the art of translation.’ – Michael Hofmann, Guardian

Poems & Prose

Georg Trakl — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:17:15 +0000

An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, whose admirers included Rilke, Heidegger, Kraus, Kokoschka and Wittgenstein and the composers Berg, Webern and Hindemith who set his poems. He is the sombre visionary of the modern age; the autumnal, melancholy moods that predominate in his poetry herald the calamity of the First World War and its consequences. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his dense, vitally sensuous poetry marks the transition from Impressionism to Expressionism, transcending both categories.

Trakl wrote at a time of spiritual and social disintegration, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a generalised sense of either anguish or exaltation. This is the background to his transcendent, often hymnic, always lyrical voice, and to his haunting imagery in which purgatory and paradise are never far apart.

First published by Libris in 2001 and now distributed by Angel Classics, this bilingual selection of Trakl’s poems and major prose pieces and prose poems is still the most comprehensive edition available to the English-language reader, who is enabled truly to get to grips with a central figure among the German Expressionist poets exhibiting what he once called ‘the universal nervousness of our century’.

‘This collection should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is well designed, reflecting Trakl’s wish for individual poems to be printed within larger cycles, and the translations themselves are accurate, unfailingly thoughtful and often very moving.’ – Jeremy Adler, London Review of Books

Beyond the Tweed: A tour of Scotland in 1858

Theodor Fontane — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:36:42 +0000

This delightful account of a journey round Scotland with the artist Lepel as companion, from Edinburgh to Inverness and back via the West Coast and Western Isles, reads as freshly today as when it was first published. Fontane wrote it before becoming a celebrated novelist. From his years of working in Britain as a journalist he had developed a deep love of English and Scottish history and culture, of Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Scottish ballads (which he translated, going on to write his own), and this book is a product of those years.

Fontane has a born gift for painting landscape, townscape and their inhabitants in a few words and buttonholing the reader with a local or historical story. At the same time he shows keen political and social awareness – of the stirrings of Scottish nationalism, the beginnings of the tourist industry – and is critical of the romantic folklore version of Scottish history, pointing firmly to Scotland’s important scientific and intellectual achievements.

Fontane’s fondly but shrewdly observed, lightly knowledgeable portrait of Scotland when it was opening up to the wider world is not only a fascinating travel document but retains all its original qualities as a thoroughly entertaining and inspiring guide for today’s traveller. This translation, first published by Dent & Sons in 1965 and reissued by Libris in 1998, is now distributed by Angel Classics.

‘Fontane’s amiably written account of Scotland’s most famous sights, richly stocked with anecdotal details, offers us a fascinating view of the country through foreign eyes at a time when the tourist industry with its attendant mythology was just beginning to take off.’ – Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday

The Thief and other stories

Georg Heym — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:04:12 +0000

The tales that Heym wrote in the last year of his life, the most powerful in German literature since Kleist, have a strong gothic flavour and prefigure the great era of the Expressionist film. An ageing, Apocalypse-crazed dropout who sees it as his God-given mission to steal and cut up the Mona Lisa, a sweet moment of memory in a corpse lying opened for autopsy, a released maniac who journeys homeward to murder his wife, the ghastly fate of a crew marooned off New Guinea – the disaffected young writer’s compulsive relationship with his material is reflected in the mesmeric, spellbinding character of these stories, which partake of the violent imagery of paintings of the time. On publication they were compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the prose pieces of Baudelaire. In the German-speaking world they have been acclaimed ever since for their power and formal beauty; they deserve to be far better known to the English-speaking reader.

These translations, the only ones in English, first published in 1994, are now distributed by Angel Classics.

‘All these stories portray humans in extremis… studies in madness, isolation and depravity, as well as essays in sickness, pestilence and destruction . . . All this is presented in Heym’s inimitable style, which combines cool observation with the most striking, lurid imagery. The translation is superb throughout.’ – Choice

On Tangled Paths

Theodor Fontane — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:52:50 +0000

In 1870s Berlin, an aristocratic officer in a glamorous cavalry regiment and a seamstress supporting herself and her invalid foster-mother with piecework defy convention by falling seriously in love.What might have been a simple tale of conflict between love and duty becomes, in Fontane’s hands, something more sophisticated.The contrast between the lovers’ whole-hearted view of each other and the world’s trivializing view of their relationship underlies a tautly sprung narrative which is tenderly moving without being sentimental; gently ironic and full of social comedy.

Fontane’s brilliant use of dialogue creates a vigorous and loving portrait of the new German capital and its inhabitants.It has taken a long time for the greatest German 19th-century novelist to find an English-language following. Peter James Bowman’s masterly new translation of Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888) offers the English reader another unforgettable novel by Fontane to set beside Effi Briest.

‘On Tangled Paths has the flawless logic and beautiful design of the novella at its best.’ – Paul Binding, The Spectator, 23/30 April 2011

‘There is an undertow of sadness to this novel, yet to read it is a joy, for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy.’ – Ruth Pavey, The Independent, 10 December 2010

No Way Back

Theodor Fontane — Sun, 02 May 2010 10:56:42 +0000

Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers follow their breakthrough version of Effi Briest with a new translation of another fine novel by Fontane, Unwiederbringlich – No Way Back (1891), set in Copenhagen and Schleswig-Holstein on the eve of the Prussian takeover of the territory in 1864.

Affable but unsophisticated Count Holk, of an ancient German Schleswig family, is inspired by a Romantic ballad to leave the modest but comfortable ancestral Schloss where he and his wife Christine have spent an idyllic early married life and build a new, architecturally ambitious ‘castle by the sea’. He is unaware of how the ballad ends … As a gentleman-in-waiting to a Danish royal princess, he is summoned to a six-month spell of duty in Copenhagen. At the princess’s lively, fun-loving court, the rural count falls into beguiling company, and his life begins to spiral out of control.

This multi-layered portrayal of a problematic marriage and a little-known corner of Danish-German history has all Fontane’s celebrated qualities: virtuosity of dialogue, elegance and irony, a tragicomic edge, and a distinctly modern sensibility.

‘No Way Back has the amplitude, the social and personal varieties, we expect of the major social novel; it surely ranks among the most imaginatively challenging and intellectually satisfying attainments in that dominant 19th-century form.’ –Paul Binding, The Spectator, 23/30 April 2011

‘Helen Chambers and Hugh Rorrison have improved on the previous English version by Douglas Parmée, especially in the handling of conversation. While Parmée’s translation sometimes felt stilted, they compose natural, idiomatic conversations.’– Ritchie Robertson, Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 2011

Carsten the Trustee; with The Swallows of St George’s, The Last Farmstead, and By the Fireside

Theodor Storm — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:21:42 +0000

‘I value in particular,’ writes Eda Sagarra in her Introduction, ‘two features of Storm’s writing. First, his multiple perspectives, the way in which he seems to invite the reader to look over the shoulder, as it were, of the teller of the story, and judge accordingly. And secondly, his sense of place, his supreme sense that his native region, North Friesland, is as much the centre of the world as was Greece for the storyteller of The Odyssey.’

Theodor Storm (1817–88) has long been enjoyed in Germany as a supreme master of the novella, to whom later writers, from Thomas Mann to Christa Wolf, have been indebted. Denis Jackson’s translations (his third selection of Storm’s novellas, entitled Paul the Puppeteer, won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for 2005) are gaining definitive status and doing much to get this chronicler of the North German coastal region more widely read in English.

In this selection of four further novellas, The Last Farmstead and the title-story depict reversals of fortune in previously prosperous farming and burgher families in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars; the autobiographical Carsten the Trustee is one of Storm’s most powerful tragic tales. The Swallows of St George’s is an intriguingly told love story from complementary viewpoints. The infectiously high-spirited By the Fireside, in which a teller of ghost stories finally wins over an initially sceptical audience, foreshadows Storm’s use of the supernatural in his later works.The translator’s end-notes, afterword and maps gently draw the reader into Storm’s understated but compelling world.

‘Denis Jackson has done a great service in providing such fluent, natural translations of these four stories, two of which appear in English for the first time.’– Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement

Young Pushkin

Yury Tynyanov — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:52:38 +0000

Yury Tynyanov’s novel on the formative years of Russia’s greatest poet was first published in serial form between 1935 and 1943. Tynyanov pioneered a new kind of historical-biographical novel in Russia. ‘I begin,’ he wrote, ‘where documents leave off.’ In a blend of encyclopedic knowledge and creative imagination, he thrillingly brings early 19th-century Russia to life – Napoleonic invasion, rapid political change, and a vast gallery of characters, all representations of real life persons. Those who had a significant impact on Pushkin’s life include his unusual family, with its African blood stemming from his great-grandfather Abram Hannibal, Peter the Great’s protégé who became a distinguished engineer general; leading figures of state and Tsar Alexander I himself; educationists and teachers, peasants and writers, Pushkin’s classmates at the Tsar’s newly founded Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo,At the centre of it all is the growing Pushkin, explosive, unpredictable, totally absorbed, constantly scribbling verses, having relationships in his teens with women twice his age, living it up in the capital with hussars, actresses and exotic hostesses before being sent into exile for his reckless verse. Tynyanov’s novel not only captures Pushkin the impulsive, swift genius, but seems also, astonishingly, to contain his origins and kinship, his relation to Russian history, and his own future.Young Pushkin is the only novel in Tynyanov’s planned series on Pushkin’s whole life that he lived to complete, and it is his fictional masterpiece. This is the first English translation.‘A sparkling jewel of a historical novel.’– Simon Sebag Montefiore‘A great Russian novel is now available to the English reading public, for which we must be profoundly grateful.’– David McLaurin, The Tablet‘Vivid and fascinating … Young Pushkin is a pleasure to be savoured.’– Philippa Gregory