Book excerpt: Valentina Polukhina is professor emeritus at Keele University. She specializes in modern Russian poetry and is the author of several major studies of Joseph Brodsky and editor of bilingual collections of the poetry of Olga Sedakova, Dmitry Prigov, and Evegeny Rein. Daniel Weissbort is cofounder, along with Ted Hughes, and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and honorary professor at the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Co-editor of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (Iowa 1992), he is also the translator of more than a dozen books, editor of numerous anthologies, and author of many collections of his own poetry. His forthcoming books include a historical reader on translation theory, a book on Ted Hughes and translation, and an edited collection of selected translations of Hughes.