Customer Reviews

SELECTED POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM (Hudson River Editions)

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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.

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.

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 Mandelstam murdered
His poems living still.