Valentin Parnakh - Paris and Return To Russia

Paris and Return To Russia

However, by 1925 Parnokh had become disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, where publishing houses were refusing to publish his poetry and his translations of the French poet Gérard de Nerval. In October 1925 Parnokh returned to Paris, where he published many articles on theater and dance in Russian immigrant newspapers and in the French press and translated Spanish literature.

The main character of Osip Mandelshtam's 1928 novella Egyptian Stamp is named "Parnok" and was perceived by Parnakh as a derogatory caricature.

Parnokh returned to the Soviet Union at the end of 1931 and served as a translator at the Foreign Board of the Writers Union. He continued his translations of Spanish writers such as Federico García Lorca.

In 1934 Parnokh published a Russian translation of a collection of Spanish and Portuguese poets (mostly Marrano Jews) who had been executed by the Inquisition (Parnakh had previously translated the poems into French as well, but the manuscript of this translation had been lost).

Read more about this topic:  Valentin Parnakh

Famous quotes containing the words paris and, paris, return and/or russia:

    Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction.... It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris ... and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.
    Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)

    Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don’t always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our manoeuvres in our emergencies and longings.
    Harold Brodkey (b. 1930)

    In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)