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A central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, Osip Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik revolution. His last poems, written on the run in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the gulag, provide an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the presence of state terror. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Important Anthology
Reading poetry in translation is somewhat risky.This widely praised selection covers much of Mandelshtam's career and represents much of his most important poetry.These are fluent English versions of the originals with many striking turns of phrase.Mandelshtam's work, however, is not easy to read.Sometimes cryptic and densely allusive, often with classical allusions, quite a few poems are hard to follow.Many of the later poems from the 30s are more direct.

W. S. Merwin gives us a shockingly original Mandelstam
I like Merwin's Mandelstam more than that of five other translators with whom I've compared Mandelstam translations. It often takes three readings of a Mandelstam poem to get why it was written---not what it is about, please---but WHY it was written. That is what you look for. After that the sense of the poem will appear. Well, Robert Lowell's imitations of Mandelstam are impressive, especially of the Stalin poem. However, in THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ROBERT LOWELL, there are only a dozen or so Mandelstam poems while the Brown/Merwin book has 97 pages of poems, along with a long forward. If you have any sense you will leap from this book to Nadezhda Mandelstam's HOPE AGAINST HOPE and HOPE ABANDONED---the story of her husband Osip's murder by Stalin. These two books have an inner light beyond praise and are two of the last century's greatest prose works---and they are marvelously translated by Max Hayward (who elsewhere has been battered for his early first English translation of ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH; nonetheless his Nadezhda Mandelstam works could not be bettered). A warning: once you get into twentieth-century Russian poetry and especially Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova you will find yourself drunk with agonies. These poets lived through societal horrors under Stalin that you can't grasp without reading Nadezhda Mandelstam. We have nothing in English like twentieth century Russian poetry. By the way, you will want the New York Review of Books Classics paperback edition of OSIP MANDELSTAM: SELECTED POEMS (by Merwin/Brown expanded). Well, while I'm at it let me say THE COMPLETE POETRY OF OSIP EMILIEVICH MANDELSTAM in English by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago from State University of New York Press (353 pages) has literal translations---perhaps closest of anyone's to Mandelstam's Russian originals---and yet the least poetic versions. But I should tell you as well that when Mandelstam himself translated Petrarch's sonnets, the Russian reader couldn't find any Petrarch after the first lines, the poems had been so Mandelstamized in Russian. So Mandelstam would have nothing against Merwin's Merwinized English versions (or Lowell's imitations). Here are a few lines of Merwin for you to compare with the Raffel/Burago literal verses. This poem is called "The Last Supper" and is about Da Vinci's great fresco:

The heaven of the supper fell in love with the wall.
It filled it with cracks. It fills them with light.
It fell into the wall. It shines out there
in the form of 13 heads.(Merwin/Browm)

Supper-sky adoring the wall--
wounded, scar-bright sky--
falling into her, flaring,
turned into 13 heads.(Raffel/Burago)

This is just the first stanza of the poem. I am happy indeed to have the COMPLETE MANDELSTAM from Raffel/Burago but I find the literal short lines too crowded; like fruitcake, enough's enough---although as I say these sharp-cut lines may be closer to the original. And the WHY of why did Mandelstam write this poem may come through more strongly in these brilliant little facets rather than in the longer lyrical line of Merwin/Brown. Take your choice!--although it's grand to have both. And let me end on one last note: Nadezha Mandelstam, who admireed Solzynitsin's IVAN DENISOVICH thought the death camp described in this work (drawn from Solzynitsin's imprisonment in the middle forties) is a day at the beach beside the camp Mandelstam was sent to in the late thirties.

His poems living still
MANDELSTAM

We do not know the way to the darkness of the word
or the excellent silence
concealed inside our poems
we only know the drumbeat of our own pain
and the flickering madness of a land's best lights lost

All we are and can be
is a poem
that will never come home again.

Stalin's death is Russia's life
The man Mandelstammurdered
His poems living still.





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

Customer Reviews (1)

brilliant
Mandelshtam (1891-1938[?]) was a creative genius who suffered for his art - enduring official denounciation and harassment, arrest, exile, rearrest and death in a Stalinist labour camp. This volume offers a wide body of his work, from 1908 and poems published in his first book, Stone, to poems written in notebooks during his exile in Voronezh shortly before his rearrest in 1938. These poems were not published during his lifetime, and until they were discovered is was assumed that he had not written anything once exiled. The translations do a good job of conveying Mandlestam's power and the way that he was able to focus his creative and intellectual energies. They are outwardly simple enough, yet compell the reader to look them over again and again, to search for deeper meanings and hidden messages. Mandlestam's widow remarks in the forward that " the translations of Mr.Greene are the best I ever saw." This in itself is a good enough reason to make this volume your choice for getting to know one of the greatest poets of the 20th centuary. ... Read more

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Highly praised collection of the work of the great Russian poet, introduced in a major essay by Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky. ... Read more

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Great Poet
Reading these poems will make you understand why Mandelstam is so highly regarded. All 50 are well-translated works of genius. It has the best version of his (suicidal) lampoon of Stalin that I have read in translation. Reading these will make you hungry for more of his work.

as good as it gets
It should be said right at the beginning: Mandelstam is perhaps the best 20th century poet. Joseph Brodsky maybe share his place, but Brodsky is also co-author of this book - he wrote great preface for it. This anthology of Mandelstam's poems is not perfect only because it is not a collection of his complete works. However, this is a book which contains some of his best poems. Both Mandelstam and Brodsky are great examples of how true are the verses by Marina Tzvetvaeva: "In this most Christian of all worlds/ All poets are Jews." The perfection of this poetry is an evidence of the fact how great poetry once was - not a long time ago. Unfortunately, today the world have very little poets even close to Mandelstam. ... Read more

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An annotated edition in both Russian and English, it is based on the Russian edition of 1928. The poet was inspired by his concern with form and Western culture, especially architecture. This work, together with "The Collected Critical Prose and Letters" mark Mandelstam's centenary in 1991. ... Read more

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Nearly comatose after the horrors of repeated interrogations by Stalin's regime, Mandelstam (1891-1938) literally wrote himself back into a semblance of life while exiled 300 miles from Moscow in Voronezh....Mandelstam presents visions of the future, his own and his country's, that are steeped in necessarily coded foreboding. It is a great gift to be able to read these ninety poems together and complete in English for the first time, with explanatory notes provided for each. They form a wrenching diary of `iron tenderness' and doomed, penetrative brilliance"" - Publishers Weekly. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for twenty years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the savior of his poetry. After his exile to Voronezh and his sentencing to hard labor for counter-revolutionary activities, he died of `heart failure' in the winter of 1938 in Siberia. ... Read more

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A must for all lovers of poetry
The discovery of Mandelstam is one of that strange gifts that Life give us every since in a while and this is probably his very best book. He wrote these poems under a terrible personal experience being a prisoner ofStalin's camps and being sure he'd die very soon. These poems, and thispoet, are not an easy ones but once you have entered into you feel thatthey are so rich that you can't almost bear it. For those who don't haveread any of his poetry i'd recommend to start reading the book"Hopeagainst hope" that his wife wrote about those years of sorrow. OM hasbeen essential in the poetry of the second half of this century and you canfollow his traces inpoets of the importance of Paul Celan and EdmondJabès. ... Read more

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Review of Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs
As a Mandelstam fanatic who has read Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam's classic two volumes of memoirs numerous times, I found this memoir enormously rewarding, as a complementary source.Ever since reading Lydia Korneevna Chukovskaya's first volume of her Akhmatova memoirs (which for me are unparalleled in conveying a picture of the 'real' Akhmatova), I have looked for precisely this type of memoir--the more details, the more quirky, subjective touches, the better. I applaud Emma Gerstein for balancing the focus perfectly between self-revelation versus descriptions of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and other creative geniuses of Soviet Russia.I would not want to read a memoir that contained nothing of the author's viewpoint, history, etc., but neither would I want something too self-absorbed.I unreservedly recommend this book for anyone interested in either Mandelstam or Akhmatova.The writing is excellent, the sensibility so engaging and prepossessing as to make me sorry that I never had the privilege of knowing the author.

Enlightening reading experience!
This is a revealing book; most books about Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Nadezhda Mandelstam, concentrate on the intellectual aspects of their work, as well as their creative process.What makes this book different is that it gets into their daily lives and personalities and surrounds that with the politics (artistic as well as governmental) of the time in which they lived. Gerstein's depictions are graphically detailedand get into the nugget of each personality.These are real, living, breathing human beings.I highly recommend it.

very disappointing
This is a very weak book when compared to Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs of the same period and personalities. Gerstein is not a gifted writer, so one must wade through a great deal of boring material to find something of interest. ... Read more

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The Noise of Time is a collection of prose works by oneof Russia's towering literary figures. ... Read more

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"The cascades of Mandelstam's glittering or tranquil images leaping out of one another, the historical, psychological, syntactical, verbal allusions, contrasts, collisions...." ... Read more

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Mandelstam (1891-1938) was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to grueling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem-with its clinching line, His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip""-and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as ""in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling."" But it was four more years before he was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. In 1938 he was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' hard labor for ""counter-revolutionary activities."" He died that winter, of ""heart failure,"" in a freezing transit camp. These masterful and moving poems, together for the first time, now return to print, ... Read more

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tr Maria Enzensberger ... Read more

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For the major poets of Osip Mandelstam's generation, poetry represented a calling in the most tangible sense. To respond to it meant to fashion from the available cultural and personal material a mythic self, one that could serve both as the organizing subject for poetry and as an object of worshipful adoration. A successful poet like Mandelstam thus became the focal point of a complex cultural phenomenon-perhaps a charismatic cult-that shaped his writings, gesture, and reception.
Gregory Freidin examines Mandelstam's legacy in this broader context and lays the groundwork for approaching modernist Russian poetry as a charismatic institution. He traces the interplay of poetic tradition, personal background, historical events, religious culture, and political developments as they entered the symbolic order of Mandelstam's art and helped determine its outlines in the reader's imagination. Many important aspects of the Mandelstam phenomenon, including the Jewish theme, the meaning of the poet's Christianity, his political stand, and, in particular, his conflict with Stalin and Stalinism, receive here a new interpretation.
A case study in the emergence of a literary cult, A Coat of Many Colors reveals how Russian poetry of the early twentieth century functioned as a charismatic institution of a distinctly modern kind. Those who belonged to it combined knowledge of the recent studies in myth, magic, and religion with the cultivation of verbal magic, mythic consciousness, and unorthodox religious beliefs. Following Mandelstam's career over its entire span (1908-1938), Freidin shows how the poet benefited from literary scholarship, comparative mythology, the history and sociology of religion at the same time he was emulating in his poetry the very subject of these academic disciplines. To account for this duality in interpreting Mandelstam's writings, Freidin draws on explanatory paradigms of contemporary human sciences, from Saussure and the Formalists to Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and Marcel Mauss. ... Read more