Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) was a Chuvash Russian poet, widely acknowledged as a seminal influence on post-war Russian avant-garde poetry for his synthesis of traditional folk lyric and the work of such European poets as Paul Celan and the French poets he translated into Chuvash, a Turkic language. His friendship with Boris Pasternak attracted the attention of Soviet authorities and he was expelled from the Gorky Institute of Literature in 1958 for "composing a book of oppositional poems undermining the basic methods of socialist realism" (not published until 1993). Having previously written in his native Chuvash, he began to write poetry in Russian in 1960 following Pasternak's suggestion. For the following ten years he worked in Moscow's Mayakovsky Museum and occupied himself with translating world poetry into Chuvash, including the anthologies Poets of France, Poets of Hungary, and Poets of Poland. His own first book did not appear in Russia until Perestroika in 1991, though his work had been well-received abroad since the 60s. Befriended by the British translator, Peter France, his Selected in English appeared first in 1997 and a new Selected is just out from Wave Books. Aygi was awarded the Andrey Bely Prize (1987), the Pasternak Prize (2000), and the Prize of the French Academy (1972), and was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Alex Cigale has had poems appear in Colorado, Green Mountains, North American, and Tampa reviews, as well as Drunken Boat and McSweeney's. His translations from the Russian can be found in Ancora Imparo, Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, The Manhattan, St. Ann's, and Washington Square reviews. He is currently Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Other translations of Gennady Aygi by Cigale have appeared in Drunken Boat and Plume Poetry.
