A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman

Author: Olga Livshin, Akhmatova Anna, Gandelsman Vladimir

Translator: Olga Livshin

Publisher: Poets and Traitors Press (2019)

Haunted by exile, longing for linkages between past and present, Olga Livshin’s A Life Replaced is a collection of poetry that wants to spread a “blanket of wild buckwheat / over a meadow”—and does just that. What is the meadow of this book? It is memory, both personal and collective, bringing voices of many poets, spoken through the same mouth to us in English: “it is summer everywhere, except war.” Livshin is in conversation with two poetic masters, our contemporary Vladimir Gandelsman, and a great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova.