- George Reavey
George Reavey (
May 1 ,1907 –August 11 ,1976 ) was aRussia n-born Irishsurrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was alsoSamuel Beckett 's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th centuryRussian poetry to an English-speaking audience. He was also the first publisher to bring out a collection of English translations of the French surrealist poetPaul Eluard .Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Reavey's literary career was his claim, made to New York press and to British editor and publisher,
Alan Clodd , that he had written "The Painted Bird" for Jerzy Kosiński. [http://www.maggs.com/pdfcatalogues/wholegrain.pdf]Early life and work
Reavey's father, Daniel Reavey, was a
flax engineer fromBelfast and his mother, Sophia Turchenko, was Russian. He was born inVitebsk and the family moved toNizhni Novgorod in 1909, where the young poet was educated and became a fluent Russian speaker. When Daniel was arrested in 1919, during theRussian Civil War , mother and son fled to Belfast.Reavey attended the
Royal Belfast Academical Institution until 1921, at which point the family moved toFulham ,London . Here he attended the Sloan School. He spent the summer holidays in Belfast, where he recorded folk ballads and Gaelic poetry in a series of notebooks. In 1926, he enteredGonville and Caius College, Cambridge , where he studiedhistory andliterature . The became associated with the group of Cambridge writers associated with the magazine "Experiment ", includingWilliam Empson ,Jacob Bronowski ,Charles Madge ,Kathleen Raine andJulian Trevelyan . He contributed prose and poetry to "Experiment" along with translations fromBoris Pasternak .The Paris years
In 1929, Reavey moved to
Paris with his friend Trevelyan. Ostensibly, this was so that he could improve his French for the entry examinations for the Indian Civil Service, but in fact he was in search of an entry into the "avant garde" artistic circles based in that city. He metThomas MacGreevy , who introduced him to Beckett,James Joyce ,Brian Coffey andDenis Devlin and to many of the writers who published in "transition". He also became a regular contributor toSamuel Putnam 's "The New Review ". Putnam published Reavey's first book, "Faust's Metamorphoses" in 1932, a series of twentyvers libre monologues based onChristopher Marlowe 's "Faust" with illustrations byS. W. Hayter who worked with Trevelyan atAtelier 17 .Around this time, Reavey started his literary agency the Bureau Littéraire Européen(later the European Literary Bureau) and his
Europa Press imprint. The first three books from the press, Reavey's own "Nostradam" (1932) and "Signes d'Adieu" and Beckett's "Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates" (both 1935).London and the Second World War
Just after publishing "Echo's Bones", Reavey moved this agency and press to London. This move can be placed in a context of a general surrealist exodus from the French capital. Between 1934 and 1936, Trevelyan,
David Gascoyne ,Herbert Read ,Roland Penrose andE. L. T. Mesens made similar moves. As a result, London became a hub of surrealist-related exhibitions and publishing. Reavey found himself extremely active in this scene, collecting paintings, contributing to Read's "Surrealism" (1936) and representing authors via the Bureau. His most notable client was Beckett, whose novel "Murphy" Reavey (unsuccessfully) attempted to place with a publisher.To coincide with the opening of the
International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Europa Press published "Thorns of Thunder", the first collection of English translations of poems by Paul Eluard to appear. The book featured a drawing byPablo Picasso and a preface by Read, and the translators included Reavey, Beckett, Devlin, Gascoyne,Man Ray andRuthven Todd .The press produced four more books, one each by Devlin, Coffey andCharles Henri Ford and Reavey's "Quixotic Perquisitions" (1939).With the outbreak of
World War II , Reavey first went to the Soviet occupied zone ofPoland to rescue his mother. He then closed down the press and bureau and joined the Foreign Office, serving inMadrid and theSoviet Union . Returning to London in 1945, he published "Soviet Literature Today" (1946) and on the back of this book he was able to move toNew York to teachRussian literature .Later life and work
Apart from occasional trips to Paris, London, Dublin and Belfast, Reavey lived out his life in the
United States , where he published a number of important translations, includingAleksandr Sergeyevich Yesenin-Volpin 's "A Leaf of Spring" (1961),Fyodor Abramov 's "New Life: A Day on a Collective Farm" (1963), the bilingual anthology "The New Russian Poets 1953 – 1968" (1968) and contributions toYevgeny Yevtushenko 's " Stolen Apples" (1972).As a poet, Reavey fell more or less out of the public eye after moving to the States, however, he continued to publish collections including "Colours of Memory" (1955) and "Seven Seas" (1971). This latter was issued by Coffey from his
Advent Press imprint. A group of seven Reavey poems were printed in the 1971 1930s special issue of "The Lace Curtain " and he was represented inJohn Montague 's "Faber Book of Irish Verse" (1974).References
Print
*Coughlan, P and Davis, A (eds) "Modernism and Ireland: the Poetry of the 1930s." ISBN 1-85918-061-2
Online
* [http://english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/earlywriting.htm An interview with George Reavey]
* [http://english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/InMemoriam.htm Photos and birth/death dates]
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