Sergey Stratanovsky’s Muddy River is the first comprehensive English-language selection of a contemporary existentialist Russian master. Taken together, the poems express the full range of Stratanovsky’s verse, drawing on seven collections that represent half a century of writing. Muddy River is the essential Anglophone introduction to Stratanovsky’s oeuvre, its now satirical, now pslamic, ever-searching poetics.
The selection was made and translated by J. Kates – a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He is the recipient of multiple awards including the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde, Metes and Bounds and The Old Testament, as well as a full book, The Briar Patch. His works of translation include titles by Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, Mikhail Yeryomin, Regina Derieva, Aleksey Porvin, Nikolai Baitov, and Genrikh Sapgir.