“Poetry has enemies, both external and internal.” Thus Maksim Amelin began his “Short Speech in Defense of Poetry,” delivered upon being awarded the Novyi mir Prize in 1998. Poetic speech should be elevated above the vernacular; it must return to the rich stanza forms, rhetorical figures, and complex syntax of the past. “Only then will it become invulnerable, only then will it fulfill its high mission” (Novyi mir 4, 1999).

Twenty years and several prestigious awards later, Amelin has since softened his antagonism toward the literary establishment. In his first book, Cold Odes (Kholodnye ody, Symposium, 1996), he had carved out a niche for himself as a poet at odds with his age, responding to the linguistic tumult of the immediate post-Soviet years with a philologist's enthusiasm for neoclassical pastiche. His latest book, Bent Speech (Gnutaia rech΄, B.S.G. Press, 2011), revealed a poet who had developed his personal quirks into a poetic platform. His signature style—the turgid bombast of eighteenth-century Pindaric odes, occasionally undercut by an ironic intrusion of modern colloquial speech—was, in fact, nothing less than an attempt to keep (Russian) poetry alive. As the book's title suggests, he does not strive for clarity; indeed, for Amelin, difficulty and artifice are the condiciones sine quibus non of poetry. If easy translatability is a virtue in the game of world literature, Amelin is a lone heretic professing the true faith. He has no followers.

It is all the more surprising, then, that Anglophone readers get a reliable impression of the poet in The Joyous Science, a selection of Amelin's poetry translated by Anne O. Fisher and Derek Mong. For nearly a decade, Fisher, a Slavist and accomplished translator, worked together with her husband, a poet and English professor, to produce these renderings, many of which have appeared in journals. As they explain in their foreword, the translators struck a compromise between their opposing priorities: Fisher produced a literal crib that catalogues “every last reference and connotation,” which Mong then used to craft a poem that can “stand on its own English feet” (11).

The translators deserve praise for capturing Amelin's Baroque contrasts in theme and register: sprit and flesh, high and low. They have keen ears for the disarming epigrammatic punchline, a recurring feature of the poems selected for the book. The revelation at the end of “A Scribe's Confession” has a striking effect in English: “I'd pore through all I've copied out, imbibe / the wisdom in words, if only I could read” (95). Earlier in the poem, they show their sensitivity to the sound effects of Amelin's “Cyclopean speech,” rendering vremia neshchadno napisannogo pesok / khrupkii skvoz΄ krupnoe seet sito as “Time sieves the sand of what's written / through the wire mesh of a riddle.” Yet for all its merits, this translation smooths out the awkwardly inverted syntax, as if parsing the text for the reader. This is just one example of many from The Joyous Science in which the translators’ choices neglect Amelin's deliberately archaic speech. Stripped of his difficult, mannered style, Amelin comes across as rather glib, and, ultimately, unremarkable.

In their translation of the title poem, a mock epic tracing the mythical escapades of Iakov Brius in Petrine-era Russia, Fisher and Mong transpose Amelin's freely adapted classical hexameter into a “loose ballad form.” In their foreword, they claim this decision “did what good form paradoxically does: it freed [them] to focus on other parts of the poem” (12). This choice turns “The Joyous Science” into an entertaining tall tale, but at the expense of much of Amelin's playful antiquarianism. The narrator's dismissive description of the old capital brims with condescension for the common folk, as if channeling the author's own prejudices: Temnyi v Moskve narodets prozhivaet: kuptsy / gorodovye, vory, prochie—ikh prisluga,—/ khera nikto ne mozhet otlichit΄ oto rtsy (64). Fisher and Mong's narrator is less refined, more colloquial: “Lackwits live in Moscow—/ merchants, sentries, thieves, and servants—/ and none knows ass from elbow” (65). Every translation is an interpretation, but this one, unfortunately, neglects one of the most salient features of the poet's works, leaving readers with a slightly distorted view.

If Amelin mounts a defense of poetry against the threat of modernity by digging into the roots of tradition, Pavel Arseniev, in contrast, questions why it needs defending in the first place. In Arseniev's view, the formal and institutional constraints of Russian verse have rendered it useless in articulating the present moment. His is an engagé poetry that articulates a leftist critique of the myriad forms of social and political alienation in contemporary Russia. The translations found in Reported Speech, executed by a collective of translators overseen by editor Anastasiya Osipova, effectively recreate the urgency and relevance of his project.

In both his poetry and his political activism, Arseniev attempts to overcome the futility of traditional methods of resistance. Civic verse and revolutionary discourse are no longer as meaningful as they once were, having been co-opted and commodified by state and commercial interests. Arseniev's answer is to subvert the role of the poet by acting as a field reporter, providing snapshots and snippets of speech from everyday life. In “Mayakovsky for Sale” (24–25), a list of hyperlinks from an online advertisement for a used volume of the poet's collected works becomes a statement on the market's power to subsume everything into its domain. Another poem, “Translator's Note” (38–43), consists of lines excerpted from a Russian translation of a philosophical tract by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In their transformed context, these disconnected scraps take on new meanings, challenging the reader to reconsider traditional notions of authorship and originality.

Arseniev's innovations are informed by his concerns about the viability of political poetry. Perhaps a poet in Russia should be less than a poet after all. At times he anticipates critiques of his approach by assuming the voices of his detractors, as in “Forensic Examination,” which reads like a report by a state prosecutor indicting the poet with inciting political extremism:

A similar satirical wit appears in “Poema Americanum,” in which a visit to a west coast university prompts the poet to reflect on his own marginality: “in time you will stop being a person / whose acquaintance is sought out by the slavic studies professors / wishing to appear more radical” (133). In this poem, as throughout the entire volume, the translation deftly captures the contrasts between a multitude of voices and perspectives, allowing Arseniev's multifaceted authorial presence to appear starkly on the page.