Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam

by Osip Mandelstam, Christian Wiman (Translator), Ilya Kaminsky (Contributor)

A new selection and translation of the work of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the most important Russian poet of the twentieth century.

Political nonconformist Osip Mandelstam's opposition to Stalin's totalitarian government made him a target of the communist state. The public recitation of his 1933 poem known in English as "The Stalin Epigram" led to his arrest, exile, and eventual imprisonment in a Siberian transit camp, where he died, presumably in 1938. Mandelstam's work, much of it written under extreme duress, is an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the face of oppression and terror.

Stolen Air spans Mandelstam's entire poetic career, from his early highly formal poems in which he reacted against Russian Symbolism to the poems of anguish and defiant abundance written in exile, when Mandelstam became a truly great poet. Aside from the famous early poems, which have a sharp new vitality in Wiman's versions, Stolen Air includes large selections from The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks.

Going beyond previous translators who did not try to reproduce Mandelstam's music, Christian Wiman has captured in English for the first time something of Mandelstam's enticing, turbulent, and utterly heartbreaking sounds.

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Russian Literature, Literature, 20th Century, Collections

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2012

About the author

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Osip Mandelshtam, Ossip Mandelstamm) (Russian: Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

STOLEN AIR: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman with contributions and Introduction by Ilya Kaminsky, 2012 by Ecco.

You're one person when you pick up a book, and when you finish, you're quite another. That's definitely how this one struck me.

Initial thoughts when I picked up this slim volume of modernist Russian poetry: past-time, a toe-in-the-water, a let's see why I keep seeing his name mentioned.

Post-reading thoughts: is this what perfection looks like? Did I just read my favorite poetry collection ever?

I've read this collection THREE times since Friday. Twice aloud to myself because the poems *sing* in a way I haven't quite encountered. Wiman's translation is sublime.

The Introduction essay by (NBA-shortlisted) poet Ilya Kaminsky propelled me right into more research on Mandelstam, and his unique poetic style. #Kaminsky notes Mandelstam's birthplace in Poland and his family's migration to Russia, learning Russian as his second language. He muses if this is why Mandelstam's use of language is different, more playful with onomatopoeia and lilting phrases and meter.

In 1934, Mandelstam wrote a short poem and recited it to some friends at a gathering. One of these friends informed on him and his subversive words about Joseph Stalin. Mandelstam was arrested and imprisoned for this act. And it wasn't the last time either. Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, were both arrested again, and sent to the gulag, where Mandelstam later died in 1938. Nadezhda survived and went on to write several books / memoirs about her and Osip's lives. Right after reading this, I ordered a copy of her book, Hope Agaist Hope, and some of Osip's translated essays.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection, chronologically ordered, the poems become increasingly strong. The one below, "We Live," however, was about Joseph Stalin, the autocratic leader of the Soviet Union where Mandelstam lived.

When Mandelstam read this mocking poem aloud, one in the group of listeners worked for Fox News and, as an informer, reported him. Here is the poem that led to Mandelstam's exile and eventual death:


We Live

We live, and love, but our lives drift like mist over what we love.
Two steps we are a whisper; ten, gone.

Still, we gather, we gossip, we laugh like humans,
And just like that our Kremlin gremlin comes alive:

His grubworm clutch, all oil and vile,
His deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk.

Listen: his jackhammering jackboots: even the chandelier shakes.
Look: a hairy cockroach crawls along his grin

At the cluck-cluck of turkey-lackeys, and he busts a gut
At the wobblegobble dance one does without a head.

Tweet-tweet, meow-meow, Please sir, more porridge:
He alone, his grub growing hard, goes No! goes Now! goes
Boom!

Half-cocked blacksmith, he lifts from hell's hottest forge
His latest law and with it brands a breast, a groin, a brain,

And like a pig farmer who's plucked a blackberry from a vine,
Savors the sweet spurt, before he turns back to his swine.


You can see the parallels, I'm sure. Especially "his deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk" that we have to listen to again and again when we just wish he would shut up once and for all. Then the dreaded "Tweet-tweet." Jesus. Not another tweet.



And, when you're feeling cheerful, you can read the likes of this:


Today Is All Beak

Today is all beak, little yellow hell
Pecking, pecking at my stone brain.

And the seaside dock gates, and the locked anchor chains,
Even the inchoate mist, see, somehow me.

Black warships inching distance as though oil.
Black wakes like waves of sound that never sounded.

And here, between the boat slips, icy emaciations
Past blackness somehow, the color of plummet...

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This translation sings.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

"Frogs, all ooze and noise, bellvowel
Their bodies into a single aural oil." (Faith)

"Better to live alluvial" (Steppes)

"I might have learned to hear
In any random rotting log
A tree release its rings year by slow year." (Steppes)

"Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not." (Sorrowdrawl)

[Lyd Havens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't remember where I first read about the life of Mandelstam—it was most likely something by Ilya Kaminsky, but I can't say for sure. A fact that stuck out to me: his wife Nadezhda (an accomplished author in her own right) and his friends memorized his poems after he was deported to the gulag where he would eventually die. I'm moved just remembering it: love as a means of archive, love as a means of defiance, love that goes beyond tangibility.

Quite simply, these poems sing. The wordplay is astonishing, with an impeccable attention to sound and structure:

"Infinite distance an infant's hand can reach—

All past blackness somehow, a blueness, a newness, a spell:
War here is a word, work a world in which to dwell.

Shit: earth's a botch, a bitch, blunt back of an ax:

[...]

Well... be well, black earth, be diligent, be visionary, be violent.
Oilvowels. Soilsayings. Silence."

—excerpts from "Black Earth," written April 1935

Christian Wiman is careful to call these poems "versions" of Mandelstam's, not translations. But according to Kaminsky's introduction, the alliteration and brief invention of new nouns is not an artistic liberty. Mandelstam honed in on the sonic components of poetry—and considering that it was too dangerous to have written copies of much of his work, it makes sense that he would focus on oral presentation as well.

I love the questions Wiman recalls asking himself in the afterword: "How, I wondered, could one voice contain such extremes of serenity and wildness, humor and horror? How could one man be so alive in the midst of so much death—including his always-impending own?"

If any book were to reignite my passion for poetry and all its importance, it would be this one. It has me seriously considering learning enough Russian to read Mandelstam's original texts.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read Nadezhda Mandelstam, Christian Wiman, and Ilya Kaminsky this year, so obviously I had to read this. Excellent, with some enlightening bits from Kaminsky and Wiman on the process of translation or rendering versions. These poems rendered by Wiman of Mandelstam’s works are playful and moving and I highly recommend.

[Cbarrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full range of emotions at play when reading Mandelstam.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, which includes lines from Mandelstam’s work, I bought this on a rainy day at the end of March. Spring was supposed to be here but wasn’t. I read a handful of the first poems in the Barnes and Noble, a few more in a bar as I watched Barcelona win a game. And then set the book aside while I finished The Man Who Loved Dogs, the new novel by Leonardo Padura that has topics and, in parts, a sensibility similar to Mandelstam’s poetry.

Mandelstam was a poet before there was a Russian Revolution, before there was a Soviet gulag (though a czarist one), and before he was an exile and victim of Stalinism. So his poetry isn’t so much shaped by these later experiences but a defiant response to it. The first poem is from 1910, “Cathedral, Empty”:

“When light, failing,
Falling

Through stained glass,
Liquefies

The long grass
At the feet of christ,

I crawl diabolical
To the foot of the cross

To sip the infinite
Tenderness

Distilled
From destroyed

Hearts:
An air of thriving

Hopelessness
Like a lone cypress

Holding on
To some airless

Annihilating height.”

The last poem in the selection is “And I Was Alive” from 1937, a year before his presumed death:

“And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

It is now. It is not.”

Mandelstam, who has many poems that deal directly with Stalinism and the gulag, gives no ground whatsoever to Stalinism, and this potent song of life’s short wonder, only makes Mandelstam’s life in poetry all the more heroic and important. And always there is this unique voice and song, whether about life or life under the Soviets.

“I like the tone of green that oceans in
And the tight rosebuds of wine that bloom in the mind,
And the towering, scouring seagull, in whose eyes nothing is lost.”
from “Casino,” 1912).

“But who can prophesy in the word good-bye
The abyss of loss into which we fall;
Or what, when the dawn fires burn in the Acropolis,
The rooster’s rusty clamor means for us;
Or why, when some new life floods the cut sky,
And the barn-warm oxen slowly eat each instant,
The rooster, harbinger of the one true life,
Beats his blazing wings on the city wall?”
(from “Tristia,” 1918).

“Wave after wave of grave aboriginal green,
And then, buds plumped to the point of bursting,
And then, again, all the soft detonations of simple spring…

But not for you, my beautiful, my pitiful,
My necrotic, psychotic age.
More cruel for the weakness that taunts you,
More crippled for the supple animal that haunts you,
You stagger on,
Staring back at the way you’ve taken: Mad tracks in a land called Gone.”
(from “My Animal, My Age,” 1923).

“Odds are I’m alive.
Odds are, like a jockey gone to slop,
There’s skip and nimble in me yet,
There’s a length of neck to stake, and there’s cunning,
And there’s an animal under me running
Which, if I can hold on, will not stop.
…
Easy, boy: impatience, too, is candy,
And we are sulk-soft, silk-kneed, mild.
Let’s take the track early, and pace ourselves,
Until all the trapped acids trickle out as sweat,
And we take time between our teeth like a bit
And let fly the wild.”
(from “Let Fly the Wild,” 1931).

“You have stolen my ocean, my swiftness, my soar,
Delivered me to the clutch of unrupturing earth,
And for what?
The mouth still moves though the man cannot.”
(“You Have Stolen My Ocean,” 1935).


And finally, “Rough Draft,” which begins with acknowledged limits but ends with expansive defiance:

“Provisionally, then, and secretive,
I speak a truth whose time is not:

It lives in love and the pain of love,
In sweat, and the sky’s playful vacancy.

A whisper, then, a purgatorial prayer,
A testament of one man, in one place:

Our bright abyss is also—and simply—happiness,
And this expanding, life-demanding space
A lifetime home for us.”

Christian Wiman has done a more than admiral job selecting and translating the poems—in his afterword, Wiman calls them versions, not translations, faithful in tone, structure and inventiveness--see the chronological liberties Wiman takes with this verse in “Gown of Iron”:

“Father, friend, O my cold counselor, I, lonely prodigal, lopped-off limb of the human tree,
Do hereby promise to plane the wood that is given me, and to plumb the lines, and to polish the grain of a frame
Fit for neo-Tatars to waterboard our latter kingdom’s quislings.”

This was my first reading of Mandelstam but I will read more and soon.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Christian Wiman is on, he's on. And in this case, he applies his considerable talents as a poet to translating Mandelstam. M himself thought translating poetry nearly impossible, and his wife, Nadezhda, speaks to this as well in Hope Against Hope, suggesting that translation is a mere mechanical process of grinding out verse, and that only occasionally can a poet render poetry from another language into poetry in his or her own language.

The poems in this volume have been judiciously selected. Some Mandelstam pieces, IMO, simply cannot be translated well, or at least cannot be translated as great poems in English... it's almost worth learning Russian to fully appreciate them. And also learning the historical and cultural context to go along with that, because if you're attached to the idea that a piece of work should stand on its own, you lose attachment that when you approach that work in translation.

If you read through a lot of Mandelstam you'll find that there are certain pieces that translators consistently struggle with. Whether it's a line or a stanza, every. single. attempt comes out differently, and it's not a matter of tweaks. And that's only the sense, not even the sound. Not to mention Mandelstam's powerful manipulation of images as juxtaposed with sound--for example, he might drive you in a few stanzas through ancestors' feasts, bloodied bones, cowardly shit, gleaming arctic foxes, wolfhounds hunting you down, pines reaching for stars, and execution. All delivered through tight, sing-song rhymes and sussurating consonants, as if he were gently whispering all this in your ear.

But all of the translations of the poem I just described are failures, IMO, and Wiman does not attempt it.

So, the translations in this collection work well because Wiman has selected the ones he could make a great difference with... He's concerned with rendering both the content AND a sense of the sound, even if he doesn't structure the poems the way Mandelstam did, or use end-rhymes in the cases where M did. You still get feeling for the juxtapositions and some of the primary concerns. He does sometimes add phrases that are in line with the meaning but not at all or even suggested in the original, but he includes them to make the lines scan, as they would have in the Russian.

As in:

Take from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey and a little sun.

In the Russian there is no sign of the phrase "for ease," but it does work better that way in English.

Much is made of M's love of life and the joy that creeps through despite the despair. Even so I would say exposing joy in the darkness is not the legacy of M's life. It was to preserve a sense of human scale and the value of human life and, fundamentally what we might define as the golden rule amid Stalinism and the Communist celebration of permanent revolution. He searched for and celebrated kindness even more than joy, I think. Perhaps Wiman might have made this clearer.

Ilya Kaminsky's introduction, BTW, is a lesson in Russian Lit that's not to be missed.


Sorrowdrawl (written while in exile, just under 2 years before dying in the gulag after rearrest--he was very sick, shattered by torture and near-starvation)

Shut up: to be alone is to be alive,
To be a alive is to be a man--
Even hazied, even queasied by this mansmash hinterland,
Lost and locked in the sky's asylum eye.

This is my prayer to the air
To which I turn and turn expecting news or ease,
Nerves minnowing from shadowhands
Toward shadowlands inside of me. This is my prayer

To be of and under a human-scale sky,
To suffer a human-scale why, to leave
This blunt sun, these eternal furrows,
For the one country that comes when I close my eyes.


From Tristia:

What rot has reached the very root of us
That we should have no language for our praise?
What is, was; what was, will be again; and our whole lives'
Sweetness lies in these meetings that we recognize.


From my favorite of all M's works, My Animal, My Age (also sometimes called The Age, or Blood the Builder):

My animal, my age, who alive can gaze
Into those eyes without becoming you?
Who alone can use, like a kind of sacrificial glue,
Word and blood to bind and mend these centuries?
....


Blood the builder brings forth the future.
From the garroted throat of this very hour.
....


My animal, my age, ravenous in your cage,
What flute might bend the bars, bind the gnarled
knees of days, and bring forth a world
Of newness, a world trued to music--
....

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandelstam is unlike other poets I’ve read with his visceral perspective writing oral poetry from his harsh exile, and I love it.

Couple snippets that stood out:
“I love by meanings I cannot comprehend,
For every instant I must taste the instant that I end.”
(Nowhere Air)

“Maybe those to whom we consecrate our lives
Lived into truths they did nog understand.”
(this Whisper)

“Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer.
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.”
(And I was Alive)


Christian Wiman put it well in the afterward “and that is, finally, what one feels most deeply after living with Mandelstam for a while: the creative defiance; the unkillable capacity for wresting light out of darkness, or making darkness express itself lightly; the hope.”

[Harry Palacio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam is a collection straight from the mouth of the Gulag, it is said Osip's wife memorized his poems only to transcribe them later into his both living and posthumous works. Mandelstam is hailed as one of the greatest if not greatest poet of the 20th century. These poems are a lark chirping in the crimson, its crepuscular is without domain. There are no names or faces. What we see in this collection is a derision, a creeping of both colors and a bastion of prismatic maths that is the colliery world of no escapes. Hence, the apparition of the Russian Gulag that exhausts the poets life and mental prowess. This book defeats and satiates by wondrous bounds.

[G L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never read Mandelstam before. I feel like most of these poems exist just past the edge of hearing. Beautiful, elusive, and worth returning to.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting poems, some of which gave me a similar feel to reading some passages of Dostoevsky in that they were grappling with large universal themes through experience. Some powerful imagery, it was also interesting to learn about Osip Mandelstam's life through the introduction and some of the poems. I found many of the poems striking and thought-provoking.

[Lorelei · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few shining stars but not my favourite collection of his work. Quite Bleak.

[Jesse Level · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how much of this is Mandelstam and how much Wiman, but I love the rhythm and internal rhyming in a lot of these poems.

[Michael Forsyth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first encounter with Mandelstam and my first encounter with translated poetry of this magnitude (collected/selected poems of one author in one book). Beautiful, humorous and heart-wrenching are all words I could use to describe the poems here. I remain mystified as to how someone who does not read/write/speak Russian translated these poems into English. Wiman, the translator, actually notes he is careful to call these poems "versions" of Mandelstam. He has tried, and to my non-Russian-speaking mind, done so with success, to bring out Mandelstam's "musicality" from the transliterated originals he was working with. Whether Mandelstam would have used these exact words that Wiman has chosen, they are beautiful works of art with words. Mandelstam was, as Wiman says, "a model for not only how to be a poet, but for how to be alive." So glad I read this, and gave it only 4 stars because I'm still hung up on this issue of translation. Wishing I read Russian so I could experience this renowned poet in the original.

The introducation is really valuable and the translator's note at the end is as well; both contribute to an understanding of the creative genius (if I may use the phrase) that was Mandelstam. His voice shifts from humor to heartbreak and his ideas and style really shine here. Some of the most moving poetry I have read.

[Marshall A. Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introduction as well as the note on translation were great reads; they also took up almost half of this book's page count. This was not a bad thing. I found a good amount of Mandelstam's poetry enjoyable; I tried to read most of it out loud to enjoy the effort Wiman put into his versions of them. My favourite poems from this collection include: 'Cathedral, Empty', 'Not one word', 'Flat' and 'Maybe madness'.

******

Upon second reading, I've expanded the poems I enjoyed most to:

Cathedral, Empty
Casino
Tristia
Night Piece
Godnausea
Gown of iron
Let fly the wild
To the translator
Flat
We live
The cage
Steppes
Sorrowdrawl
Maybe madness

******

Somehow, according to my previous lists of favourite poems, I never seemed to appreciate

Black Earth

this is a shame, as it is a beautiful poem. Whether I forgot it both times or finally upon my third reading finally appreciated it, regardless, it’s wonderful.

Other nice poems that I previously left unmentioned:

Leningrad
Batyushkov
Today is all beak
Faith

[Michael Odom · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first reading was too rushed. But in a slower moment this summer, I returned to it. Some of these poems are as wonderful as any translation I've read and Mandelstam is a favorite of mine.

[Ben Palpant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Hopkins-like. A galloping gladness of grief.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

To translate, or to emulate? It’s a vogueish question, with respondents increasingly filling the latter pool. After War Music, it seems silly to put forth more prosaic translations, with approximated enjambments and swapping out one language for another as though it could be done with a thesaurus. Today, an errant version of a poem can be forgiven if it captures the poem’s quintessence while imitating its melopoeia. (This book even compares itself to War Music in the translator's afterword.)

So it goes with this version of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, translated by Christian Wiman. After a second reading, I got the feeling I was (at times) reading Wiman more than M, and so I supplemented my third reading with the more straightforward translations available online. That said, I don’t want to sing the praises of literal translations, nor do I want to slight 'versions'. Give a student War Music, for example, and s/he won’t know shit about Homer; on the other hand, present a student with a prose translation of Homer and you're going to ruin the poem. There has to be a balance. And readers need context in order to venture out from the translations and into the versions of foreign-language poets. Fortunately for readers who know zilch about Russian (i.e. me), slim book comes with a nifty introduction that orients readers in M’s voice. There's even an afterword by Wiman explaining his translation method.

First things first. Ilya Kaminski’s introduction is so filmic, so electric that it alone justifies the book’s existence. He introduces M with an urgency one might find in a Frank Miller comic. I’ve never encountered an introduction quite like it; it can be downright silly in its playfulness: ‘And what [Russian poetry] was before Pushkin? Darkness.’ And one can almost hear the clatter of a typewriter or the ding of the ribbon as Kaminsky breaks paragraphs with sentences like ‘1919. Kiev. He marries Nadezha.’ Clocking in at 42 pages, Kaminski’s intro comprises one-third of this book, and could not serve as a better warm-up act for some poetry.

Kaminsky says M’s voice was mutable, shifting as M went from youth into exile. These poems are accordingly trifurcated into ‘Early Poems’, ‘The Moscow Notebooks’, and the ‘Voronezh Notebooks’. It sounds obvious to say, but this is very helpful; without the dates, it would be impossible to parse which era each poem comes from. And that's my chief gripe with this book: Wiman translates each poem in a different voice. Does this contradict the introduction, which argues that M's voice evolved with time? Or does this reflect the Russian itself. Did M wake up with a different voice each day.

Example: Three poems from the 1910s, though technically all ‘Early Poems’, shift registers. Consider ‘Hard Night’ (the Homer poem): Wiman translates the birds above Troy as ‘the sun-flecked, god-picked wings glinting spray’, which is distinctly the voice of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem takes a turn into Heaney (‘The singer and the sea, all things are moved by love’) before concluding with the voice of Larkin: ‘And a wall of silence, eerily eloquent, | Breaks like a black wave above my bed.’

The next poem in the collection, ‘Tristia’, sounds like a necromancer has reawakened Emily Dickinson: ‘There is, I know, a science of separation.’ If you just heard, ‘After a great pain, a formal feeling comes’, then I’m with you. And I think Wiman is, too. He’s a master at picking and choosing from the Anglophonic canon. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot have both stated how important rhythm is to a poet—that rhythm should come into the poet’s mind before words—and Wiman has a deft ear for that. That he can pull from Donne and H.D., then blend Rich and Larkin—all the while earning the stamp of approval from Kaminsky—is remarkable; it’s also something only the editor of a noteworthy poetry magazine could do. It’s impossible not to hear Larkin in closing lines of ‘Casino’:

‘I like the cakelike casino on the dunes,
And how the strict fingers of skeletal light
Come alive on the baize, and the view, vast as a mist.’

So, there’s an added bonus. We get to read Mandelstam—ish—and also play a guessing game: whom was Wiman conjuring when he translated this poem? But forget about all of that for a moment, because one could flip to any page of this collection and hear something serene. Here. I’ll do it myself right now. Let me flip to a random page:


Half-cocked blacksmith, he lifts from hell’s hottest forge
His latest law and with it brands a breast, a groin, a brain

What remarkable rhythm: the symmetry of vowels in ‘half-cocked blacksmith’, the pants of h-sounds in ‘he lifts from hell’s hottest forge’, followed by the tongue-flicking l-sounds of ‘latest laws’. Yes, it’s no wonder that—somewhere in the Russian—this poem (‘We Live’) pissed off Stalin so much that it sent Mandelstam into prison, then exile, and death.

[Kate's Book Parade · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know. You’re looking at this book and going “huh?” Because, 1) I’m guessing 99% of you have never heard of this one, b) you’re about to learn it’s a translation and that can be *intimidating,* but mostly III) I’m about to tell you it’s poetry and this community generally seems like it’s either afraid of or straight up shunning poets (if I ever need to be humbled I comment on the “I’m bored, what should I read” posts with “ go spend some quality time with Sylvia Plath” and nurse my wounded pride after the ensuing vitriol/unfollows).

I took a lot of things away from college (dressing for my body type, my best friends on the planet, a truly godawful haircut), but most surprising was a love for poetry, and it was this book that converted me. I re-read it this week with the sole purpose of singing the praises of one Osip Mandelstam and his brilliant translator, Christian Wiman, and was once again moved to tears.

I spent a lot of my life afraid of negative emotions (*claaassic* 7 for any enneagram fans out there) and poetry helped me give shape to the hard work of learning to create space for simultaneous beauty and pain without feeling like something was being stolen from me. I was first introduced to Mandelstam (and, honestly, poetry as a genre) through one poem in this collection, Maybe Madness, which I have since committed to memory and share aggressively with anyone struggling with anxiety, chaos, hopelessness, loss of control (which, yes, is just humans). When I learned Mandelstam wrote all of these poems ORALLY while imprisoned for standing up to STALIN and clandestinely whispering them to his WIFE who then put them secretly on paper and preserved them AFTER HIS DEATH, I was sold, hook line and sinker.

In this weird time, I urge anyone struggling to put words to their emotions to spend time chewing over the weighty and beautiful words of Stolen Air. You can Google these poems! Mandelstam writes for all who feel life is spiraling into a control-less confusion of pain as they struggle to find beauty in chaos. Is that not all of us? I hope you find solidarity and beauty in these days. I offer this masterpiece as one tool to help.

****
Quotes! Ok so apparently it’s tough to “quote” a collection of poetry (shoulda saw that one coming). Every time I tried to take my favorite lines out of context, they totally lost their magic, and this collection is *truly* magic! So instead, I’m going to leave you with my favorite poem from the collection, Maybe Madness. Obviously, taste in poetry is totally subjective, and there’s a good chance you read this and immediately scroll to the next post in your feed, but try? Read it a few times. See what, if anything, you glean from it. If it resonates with you even the littlest bit, even if it’s just an appreciation for the way a line sounds, go try his other gorgeous poems.
*
Maybe madness too has meaning here.
Maybe conscience, knotted like a cyst,
Knowing and being known by sun and air —
Maybe life unties and we exist.
*
Bring to mind the mindless spider, its care
For the pillared invisible, little crystal temple,
All air and otherness:
*
As if a form could thank its maker,
As if every line of light back to one source were drawn,
As if, deep in wilderness
A raftered hall rose around the risen guests,
All pains purged from their faces...
*
As it is on earth, Lord, not in heaven.
On earth, and in a house whose walls are song.
Even the birds, even the littlest, fearless.
O Lord, to live so long...
*
Forgive me this, forgive what I am saying.
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying.
*
Mandelstam, 1937

[John Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is unfathomably brilliant. If you are reading this review, I hope you're reading to hear someone else gush about it.

For context Osip Mandelstman wrote during the reign of Stallin. Mandelstam wrote a poem: Stallin's Epigraph where he calls Stalin "a parasite of power". Soviet party members shun him. Mandelstam goes broke. He asks about the Writers Guild about the price of a coffin. Why? Mandelstam didn't care they could bury him in the ground he was hungry. Eventually Stallin has enough and Osip gets sent to a forced labor camp to die. Stallin starts burning his poems. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip's partner, starts memorizing everything he ever wrote. Everything we have is because Nadezhda memorized it.

The poetry itself is stunning, Christian Wiman got this one write. My favorite poem begins:
"Fuck, this sulk, these pansy stanzas tickling doom."

Another translation of the same line begins: "That's enough of this sulking, shove the papers in the desk."

Wiman turned me into a devotee of Mandelstam, there is so much beauty. "You can't untie a boat unmoared, / fur shod shadows can't be heard / nor terror in this life, mastered."

IDK what to say, humanity would be better if we all read this collection, beautiful, electric and unapolgetically alive Mandelstam's voice rings beyond the grave

[Shervin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I prefer the other translators of Mandelstam though Wiman does try to make these work in English.

Some lines I like:

"And so I learned, and painfully earned, on the beaches of the
Black Sea,
The European allure of sorrow
Sensualized in quotations, flirtations, some random clavicle
Cutting through me like a scalpel.

A man returned, or almost...

Petersburg, pitiless city,
With your fire-scarred towers and frostburned poor,
Your insolent adolescence,
your furious frivolous doom,

What ancient claim do you make on me?"

"Come let us play the game
Of what to take and when to run,
Of come with me and come what may
And holding hands to hold off the sun."

"Scherzowitz! Enoughofits!
Let the dulce de leche maiden
Swoon Schubert through her skin,
Let the children's sleigh allegro
This swiftness and darkness and starsparkle snow.

We're not afraid to die,
You and I,"

"A thousand plowed-up mounds exploding speech:
Infinite distance an infant's hand can reach-"

"Consider the river, its constancy, its skin of almost ice,
Like a lullaby nullifed by wakefulness..."

"Oh, to be made, marred, mired deep in time, to grasp,
When like a diver all of summer holds its breath."

"Are these my eyes erupting green?
This my mouth mist seeks to mean?"

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Ken Craft for introducing me to the work of Osip Mandelstam. I have so many favorite poems and specific lines but the last one in particular is haunting me.

And I Was Alive

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

[David Grosskopf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Osip Mandelstam was arrested and executed for his poetry by Stalin. It was a surprise to find its defiance in such a strong register of humor—the sound, the word play, which the translator Christian Wiman captures well, I think. Wiman describes his own process with the work: “How, I wondered, could one voice contain such extremes of serenity and wildness, humor and horror?” (73).

My favorite poems are “The Necklace” (11), “Gown of Iron” (35), “Flat” (40), “Black Earth” (53), and “Steppes” (60).

Wiman describes Mandelstam’s “creative defiance; the unkillable capacity for wresting light out of darkness, or making darkness express itself lightly; the hope” (77).

[Laine Sanderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because I had heard about Osip Mandelstam's life and found his story very intriguing. The poetry itself was rather lacking for me though. Alot of it went straight over my head. Maybe it was the translation? I did find that his Voronezh Notebooks, which were at the end of this compilation of his works, were the most enjoyable and easiest to understand.

[Shiloh · Rating 5 out of 5]

You ever start reading a book, and two pages into the meat of the work know you're going to buy it and read it a million times? That's the vibe.

Incredible poet, translated by another incredible poet. Will probably update this review later with better explanations. Or I'll just read it again, and do this again.

[Celinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only collection of poetry to make me audibly weep. Never experienced that before, or since reading this. Perhaps it was just what I needed at the time -- I'm not exactly sure what it was. But it's exquisite.

[Morgan Condict · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How’s the metro these days?
And the cherry buds—pretty?

Don’t talk, spare your strength,
Hold hard to this hard city

And its wonky clocks,
Lists and twists enough to make one seasick,

And then, again,
All of space crushed suddenly to one dark tick.”

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

译文（衍译？）音韵绝好，作者光彩摄人。