Osip Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist, a pivotal figure in the Acmeist movement. His work captures the tumultuous era of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. Mandelstam's poetry and essays are celebrated for their intellectual rigor and formal elegance, often exploring themes of memory, culture, and individual freedom against the backdrop of oppressive regimes. His distinct voice and literary significance endure despite the tragic circumstances of his life.
Osip Mandelstam's second collection of poems, Tristia, astonished Russian readers in 1922 with its daring verse forms and meditations on revolution, exile, death and rebirth. Thomas de Waal's new translation gives English-language reader the chance to experience the entire collection for the first time.
The ninety-odd poems Mandelstam wrote in Voronezh are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to his consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought.
The introduction and translated poems of Mandelstam within are the gold- standard for critics and readers who don't know Russian. They expertly illuminate other Mandelstam translations, not replacing them, but rather allowing for a better understanding of what they specifically contribute.
Russia’s foremost modernist master in a major new translation
A selection of poems by Osip Mandelstam translated into English and with a postscript by Ilya Bernstein. Most of the poems are from the 1930s, mostly from the "Voronezh Notebooks" (1935-1937). The collection includes several longer poems: The Slate Ode, The Octaves Cycle, The Verses on the Unknown Soldier, and The Ode to Stalin.The translations were guided by the belief that the most important thing about a poem is neither its meaning nor its sound, but whatever it is in it that makes its readers memorize it. Accordingly, an attempt has been made here to capture that particular aspect of the originals, with the hope of making English-language versions of Mandelstam's poems that at the very least point to that which invites memorization in his work, and which in the best cases may be memory-worthy in their own right.
Osip Mandelstam is one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work. Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full of the sights and sounds of the steppes, blue sky and black earth, the roads, winter breath, spring with its birds and flowers and bees, the notebooks are a continual improvisation and an unapologetic affirmation of poetry as life.
Proudly part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, a collection of Russian masterpieces
The last published work of a great poet who wrote a few lines attacking Stalin and was shortly thereafter exiled to Siberia where he died near Vladivostok six years later. An inimitable volume, Journey to Armenia is a travel book in name only. Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay, he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture. This edition also includes the companion piece, “Conversation About Dante,” which Seamus Heaney called “Osip Mandelstam’s astonishing fantasia on poetic creation.” An incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and a challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, the essay was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934 and 1935, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to Journey to Armenia.
CONTENTS Acknowledgments. A Note on the Text. List of Abbreviations. Introduction. Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder. STONE. Notes. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This edition combines two previous separate editions of The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks published by Bloodaxe. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution (1930-34), when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the Voronezh Notebooks.