Distinguished poet and novelist D.M.Thomas, best-known for his novel The White Hotel, is also noted for his translations of the great Russian poets Pushkin and Akhmatova. Explaining why he has now translated Pushkin’s mighty verse-novel, Onegin, he writes: ‘I wanted to spend a few months with a poet I love, to revisit him, and there is no more intimate and rewarding way of doing this than the act of translation’.
Onegin, one of the great classics of world literature, sweeps the reader along with its tender, witty and tragic tale of passion and death in the Russia of two centuries ago, and Thomas uses all his poetic skills to stay true to the original while making it seem effortless and immediate in English.
Of D.M. Thomas’s previous Pushkin translations, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems, John Bayley wrote: ‘I am deeply impressed… I really didn’t think it could be done… A triumphant success.’ And Erica Jong: ‘D.M. Thomas makes this astounding poet available to us as if for the first time. The Bronze Horseman is the most exciting and inspiring volume to cross my desk since The White Hotel.’
Thomas’s new verse collection, Two Countries, which includes a long autobiographical poem using the stanza-form of Onegin, The Russia Train, is being published simultaneously with this book.
About D.M. Thomas
D.M.Thomas,is a poet and novelist. He was awarded the Los Angeles Fiction prize for his novel The White Hotel, which has been translated into 30 languages; a Cholmondeley award for poetry; and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His translations of Russian poetry have been highly praised.
