Reinventing the Canon for Free.

April 26, 2017 by 14 Comments

The newly published book Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon, edited by Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith, is an interesting-looking collection of essays available in paperback for £25.95, in hardback for £36.95, and as a pdf download for free! Just go to the Open Book Publishers book page and click the appropriate link (there’s also a description of the book if you scroll down). I approve of this sort of thing!

Comments

  1. D.O. says
    April 26, 2017 at 11:10 pm

    The 10th essay in the book is by Emily Lygo The Thaw Generation Poets in the Post-Soviet Period. “Thaw generation” must be something that Russians would have called “поколение оттепели”. This is indeed the title of the book by Ludmila Alexeeva, but other than that is never used. The usual name of this generation is шестидесятники. The problem is, I have hard time figuring out how to translate it into English. This is a frequent and very important word for Russians, it must be translated. The most direct would be “generation of the sixties” or “people of the sixties” but both of them are clunky…

  2. Piotr Gąsiorowski says
    April 27, 2017 at 6:14 am

    I thought “the Sixties’ Generation” or “the Sixtiers” were more or less standard translations of шестидесятники. Granted, many other countries also have their “60s’ generations”, so the term is potentially ambiguous, but you can always call them the Soviet Sixtiers for clarity.

  3. David Marjanović says
    April 27, 2017 at 6:55 am

    Sixty-ers…?

    (Sechziger does not work in German because it already refers to the 60s themselves.)

  4. Piotr Gąsiorowski says
    April 27, 2017 at 8:03 am

    I wrote about the Sixtiers in a comment which for some reason is awaiting moderation.

  5. languagehat says
    April 27, 2017 at 9:11 am

    Released from durance vile!

    I thought “the Sixties’ Generation” or “the Sixtiers” were more or less standard translations of шестидесятники.

    I’m not familiar with them. But I don’t think English-speaking people talk about that Soviet generation nearly as much as Russians do, so there may not be a standard term. “Thaw generation” may not be used in Russian, but so what? It’s a perfectly good, euphonious phrase in English, and I hope it catches on.

  6. SFReader says
    April 27, 2017 at 9:30 am

    I always thought that shestidesyatniki meant people like Herzen and Chernyshevsky – all those nihilists and narodniks like Turgenev’s Bazarov.

  7. languagehat says
    April 27, 2017 at 10:42 am

    That’s part of the problem — the 1860s and 1960s were similarly important and memorable periods, and shestidesyatniki is used for both. (Of course, context generally makes the referent clear.)

  8. Brett says
    April 27, 2017 at 11:12 am

    Speaking of ambiguous decade references, I personally have a hard time parsing (written) “2000s” or (spoken) “two thousands” as a decade. It always sounds to me like it should cover the whole millennium. Does anybody else get this?

  9. languagehat says
    April 27, 2017 at 11:32 am

    No, because I find it hard to imagine a context in which the “whole millennium” sense would be useful.

  10. John Cowan says
    April 27, 2017 at 12:17 pm

    In any case we have a perfectly good phrase the third millennium, like the 21st century.

  11. languagehat says
    April 27, 2017 at 12:53 pm

    Exactly.

  12. David Marjanović says
    April 27, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    I personally have a hard time parsing (written) “2000s” or (spoken) “two thousands” as a decade. It always sounds to me like it should cover the whole millennium. Does anybody else get this?

    I have the converse problem, having to remind myself that “the 1800s” are almost always supposed to mean “the 19th century” instead of just the decade as they would in German…

  13. Hans says
    April 30, 2017 at 1:50 pm

    I have the converse problem, having to remind myself that “the 1800s” are almost always supposed to mean “the 19th century” instead of just the decade as they would in German…
    To be honest, if I’d see something like “die 1800er (Jahre)”, I would need some context to understand what period that is supposed to refer to – a problem I wouödn’t experience with any of the other decades.

  14. January First-of-May says
    May 1, 2017 at 4:08 am

    In my CCF experience, I always used “the 1900s” (and so on in the past) to mean the decade, but most of the other posters referred that way to the century.

    IIRC, it was hilarious when the “walking back by decades” thread was stuck for a while on the 700s, and they had to occasionally clarify that no, they didn’t mean the entire 8th century.

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