Poets & Traitors Press
Relative Genitive
Val Vinokur
Original poems | Translations of Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky
In Relative Genitive, Val Vinokur translates two of the great Russian poets of the early twentieth century: the Acmeist neo-classicist Osip Mandelstam and the Futurist revolutionary Vladimir Mayakovsky. This unlikely combination is elegantly woven together by the thread of Vinokur’s own poems, echoing the sound and spirit of the poets he has translated, and collapsing the distance between high culture and low, beauty and wreckage, origin and destination.
- Publication
- July 15, 2018
- ISBN
- 978-0-9990737-1-1
- Price
- $18
Praise
“The book testifies to a poet’s ability to adapt to different forms of life, to adopt new languages and cultures, thus exposing the relative nature of the poet’s own identity.”— Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, Slavic and East European Journal
“Vinokur injects memory, biography, and cultural nuance into every facet of the book.”— Jon Stone, Reading in Translation
About Val Vinokur
Val Vinokur was born in Moscow and immigrated to Miami Beach as a child. He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern 2009), and has published poetry, translations, and prose in The Boston Review, New American Writing, The Literary Review, McSweeney’s, and The Massachusetts Review. His co-translations with Rose Réjouis were recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions, was published in 2017. Vinokur is the founding editor of Poets & Traitors Press.
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