Book Presentation: Vasili Tyorkin: A Poem About a Soldier

Pushkin House invites to join the talk about the new translation of the Soviet classic. Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s pocket epic Vasili Tyorkin: A Poem About a Soldier, is one of the few genuinely popular works of art to emerge from the Second World War. Originally invented by Tvardovsky and some colleagues during the Finnish War of 1939, Tyorkin – the roguish, humorous, eternally optimistic Soviet infantryman – developed into a phenomenon during the latter conflict. A voice of human reason, the embodiment of a no-nonsense, commonsensical view of the war, Tyorkin’s adventures, written almost in real-time, were printed in frontline newspapers and achieved a genuine popular following.

James Womack’s translation of Tvardovsky’s long poem, the first one since the fall of the Soviet Union, captures its blunt, popular tone. Womack and the publisher of the new Vasili Tyorkin, Andy Croft of Smokestack Books, will discuss the work’s significance, the historical circumstances within which it was written, and how it is an excellent example of Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry: ‘news that stays news’.

James Womack b. 1979 lives in Cambridge, where he teaches translation at Cambridge University. He is a poet and translator, largely from Russian and Spanish, and has produced versions of poets including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov and, most recently, Manuel Vilas.

In English.