Gennady Aigi (1934-2006) is a Chuvash 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. 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 written in his native Chuvash, following Pasternak’s suggestion he began to write poetry in Russian in 1960. For the following 10 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 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. Aigi had been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and awarded the Andrey Bely Prize (1987), the Pasternak Prize (2000), and the Prize of the French Academy (1972).
Alex Cigale’s poems have appeared in Colorado, Green Mountains, and St. Petersburg reviews, Gargoyle, Redactions, and 32 Poems, and online in Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n, elimae, and McSweeney’s. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. A monthly column of translations of Russian Silver Age poets and an anthology of Silver Age miniature poems are on-line at Danse Macabre and OffCourse, respectively. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.