Product Description

James Greene's acclaimed translations of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, now in an extensively revised and augmented edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #358326 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-12
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

Long Truth, Short Hedge
Mandelshtam was one of Russia's great poets and this selection of poems covers three distinct phases. First are the early years - interesting for the insight into the development of the young man. Playing with words, playing with us but nothing that really grabbed me. Then there are the splendid middle years especially the poems from "Tristia". These are crisp and cutting and especially melancholic. "Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us". Finally there are the late years which are as wistful as they are sentimental. Now, Mandelshtam approaches his destiny with Stalin's hit men. "I seem to be walking towards the future but it seems I shall never see it".

A feeling of moroseness pervades Mandelshtam's verse. "I'm not in favour of premeditated happiness" he says. One imagines the poet struggling with himself - who is he ("What shall I do with the body I've been given?"), why is he in this place and in this time where his liberty has been stolen and his talent not permitted any oxygen. He was brave or foolish to write critically of Stalin "His fat fingers slimy as worms ... He forges decree after decree like horseshoes" but then tried to hedge his bets by calling Stalin "father" in his eulogy to The Boss.

It's not easy speaking the truth with The Man of Steel as one's father. Perhaps my life isn't that unfortunate after all.

Mandelshtam's Selected Poems
Mandelshtam is a fantastic poet -- for some reason he's not as well known in England as his contemporaries Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva. His influence is to be seen in Paul Celan's poems (Celan translated Mandelshtam into German) -- and perhaps through this, he will come to have a larger influence on English poetry than his contemporaries ... who knows?

Mandelshtam's poetry is full of images; aware of history; managing to be (so it seems in these English versions) fully poetic without being effete -- as if he believed that poetry was as adequate at representing life as prose (a strange thought to many English poets!)

Reading a translation you are aware of how much is missing: the formal side of the poems can only be hinted at; and Mandelshtam's word play has to be given in notes at the back of the poem (one poem sees him playing obsessively with words related by the sound "os": Osip, Iosef (Stalin), "osa", wasp, and "os", axis). But the versions read very well as English poems, and Nadezdha Mandelshtam recommended these as the best translations of her husband's poetry.

There are two memoirs of Osip by his wife, Nadezdha: 'Hope Against Hope' and 'Hope Abandoned'.