Endarkenment: Selected Poems

Major collection by a contemporary Russian avant-garde master

The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko’s writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language--although ＂perpetually incomplete＂ and shifting in meaning--remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet’s Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko’s work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader’s companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.

ARKADII DRAGOMOSHCHENKO (1946-;2012) was a Russian experimental poet, essayist, and translator. The winner of innumerable prizes both Russian and international, he published and translated broadly, introducing Russian readers to American poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY, a poet and translator, is the author of two books of poetry, including The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza.