On January 22, founder and president of TechInput Group of Companies, visiting professor at the Moscow State University, the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the New Economic School, as well as several US universities, publisher of a number of bilingual US magazines, and literary translator Boris Aronshtein met with the readership of the Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature where he gave a lecture titled: “William Butler Yeats – Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”.
“…Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives…” (W.H.Auden In Memory of W.B.Yeats).
“A poet constantly comes into direct interaction with the language and through the language alone does his response to what he has read and what he has heard meet its actualisation” (Joseph Brodsky). These lines amply define William Butler Yeats, a playwright, one of Ireland’s greatest poets who is by right seen as a gem of both English and Irish literature and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1923 “For always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”».
“Yeats’ poetry, whose language structure appears to be something of a challenge for Russian-speaking minds, can be summed up in one term – “enfante terrible”, which may mean both “unruly child” and “appalling beauty”. That duality reflects the philosophical and mystical search in the whirlpool where history and the soul find themselves in the age of mature materialism. The duality in Yeats’ work is simultaneously the same dualism one finds involving romanticism and modernism, which can be escaped only with the help of a romantic character, an emotion, nature, and beauty. And it is that dualism that permeates Yeats’ poetry, believes Boris Aronstein.
Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature is a federal library specializing in literature in foreign languages. Back in 1921, it was started as a Neophilologica library. Presently, the library a unique collection of foreign literature, which includes books and periodical literature in over 140 languages of the world.
