Excerpt from Masters of Russian Song, Vol. 1 of 2: Twenty-Five Songs by Moussorgsky Probably no layman can imagine the difficulty of translating these strange and powerful musical incarnations into poetici or even adequate English. This, then, being the first time that these song-cycles are given in English versions, no effort was spared by my col laborators and myself to render them as perfectly as possible; many a poem in this volume has been translated four or five times, before one compound version was deemed acceptable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.