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2 books match the query 'Rudman, Mark'
My Sister - Life
Boris Pasternak
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Osip Mandelstam wrote: "To read the poems of Pasternak is to get one's throat clear, to fortify one's breathing. . . . I see Pasternak's My Sister - Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing . . . a cure for tuberculosis." This English translation, rendered with verve and intelligence by Mark Rudman, is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the original Russian text.
The Book of Samuel
Essays on Poetry and ImaginationMark Rudman
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Crisis, breakdown, rejuvenation: this is the territory of poetry that Rudman takes readers into with this set of essays. Constructed as a series of character studies, the essays are rooted in autobiographical material with biographical counterpoints, tying the poets distinctly to places. Even as they are placed, however, they are displaced: Rudman's subjects, from D.H. Lawrence to Czeslaw Milosz to T. S. Eliot, are almost all exiles, either geographically or within themselves. This exile spins anger into energy, transmuting emotion into imagination the same way that Passaic Falls, known to William Carlos Williams, turns water into power.
The mosaic style of the essays touches on nerve after nerve, avoiding the snags of academic jargon to ease towards an illuminating truth about the artists' shifting work and worlds. Some of the Samuels—Beckett and Fuller—were able to navigate these shifts, while others--Coleridge and Johnson--are shown to be less able to transmute their energy into motion.