Lions and Acrobats

Anatoly Genrikovich Naiman, poet, novelist, critic and literary translator, was born in 1936 into a family of followers of Tolstoy. Having studied as an engineer, he became one of the Leningrad group of young poets (including his friend Joseph Brodsky) around Anna Akhmatova, whose literary secretary he became from 1962 until her death in 1966, and about whom he wrote the invaluable and popular memoir, Remembering Anna Akhmatova. In 2001 two of his novels (most recently Sir) was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize.

Naiman’s work as critic, memoirist and translator (of Leopardi, Provençal poets, and T. S. Eliot, among others) has often eclipsed his own poetry. Lions and Acrobats—a selection of work from his first four books of poetry in Russian—displays, for the first time in English, the full breadth of Naiman’s poetic output.

Anatoly Naiman has been a fellow at Oxford University and at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center and has lectured on Russian literature at a host of universities in Europe and the United States.

Frank Reeve is a poet, scholar, anthologist and author of a dozen books of translation from Russian and reportage on Russian affairs, including Five Short Novels by Turgenev, the two-volume Anthology of Russian Plays, The Garden (poems by Bella Akhmadulina) and Robert Frost in Russia, which was also published by Zephyr Press.

Margo Shohl Rosen, poet and translator, is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages. Her translations have been published in the London Review of Books and the Mississippi Review. Her own poetry has appeared in Oktiabr’. In 2004 she was co-winner of the Slavic department’s Pushkin Prize for best poetry translation.