Ennui By The Black Sea The Shade Of Ovid S Exile In Pushkin S Eugene Onegin

Russian poet, playwright and novelist of the Romantic era, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 - 1837), was exiled by Emperor Alexander I. Isolated from his close friends and literary circle, he recalled the written experiences of exile of Roman poet Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD), who was exiled from Rome. This book presents a close reading of Ovid and Pushkin's exilic outputs and looks at their geographic displacement and the influence it had, psychologically and otherwise, on works such as Eugene Onegin. © Frances Forbes-Carbines 2023 Cover Image: Русский писатель и поэт: Александр Сергеевич (1799-1837)

"This is no small achievement. For the language-lover the translation provides elegant, flowing English verse, for the classicist it conveys close approximation to the Latin meaning coupled with a sense of the movement and rhythmic variety of Ovid's language"—Geraldine Herbert-Brown, editor of Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium "This book fills a gap. There is no similar annotated English translation of Ovid's exile poetry. Thoroughly grounded in Ovidian scholarship, Green's introduction and notes are helpful and informative. The translation is accurate, idiomatic, and lively, closely imitating the Latin elegiac couplet and capturing Ovid's changing moods."—Karl Galinsky, author of Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects

"Someone clever, passionate, and heartbroken comes very near us, and I think it is Ovid. I found it impossible to stop reading these poems. And poems they are."--Richard Wilbur.

In AD 8 Ovid's brilliant career was abruptly ruined when the Emperor Augustus banished him, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, to Tomis (Constanta) on the Black Sea. The five books of Tristia (Sorrows) express his reaction to this savage and, as he clearly regarded it, unjust sentence. Though their ostensible theme is the misery and loneliness of exile, their real message, if they are read with the care they deserve, is one of affirmation. With a wit and irony that borders on defiance, Ovid repeatedly asserts the injustice of his sentence and of the preeminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. In technical skill and inventiveness these elegies rank with the Art of Love or the Fasti. For this new translation Alan Melville has reproduced, in rhyming stanzas, the virtuosity, wit, and elegance of the original.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

Reproduction of the original: An Outline of Russian Literature by Maurice Baring