Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Editors’ Welcome

(along with Vladimir Burich and Arvo Metz) of contemporary Russian free verse. He has been the laureate of numerous awards, including the Bunin Prize (2010). As an outstanding Russian translator of German poetry, particularly noted for his Selected Rainer Maria Rilke (2006), Kupriyanov has himself had a long presence in Germany, with many of his own books published in German translation, however, the present selection represents his most substantial publication in English to date. Not unlike Kupriyanov, Alexander Ulanov has one foot firmly planted in the West and one in the East. A professor of aeronautical engineering (plane engine design) in the southern city of Samara (Russia’s border with Kazakhstan), he often spends his summers working in China. His impressionistic, dreamy, surrealistic, nature-bound prose poems are very much reminiscent of a Russian Francis Ponge, and I particularly wanted to represent these two pioneers of the prose poem, as it seems to me that this field, that has been so fertile of late in American poetry, is perhaps the newest development in Russian poetry. Ulanov is also a translator of Modernist English poetry as well as a noted critic of contemporary Russian poetry.

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