The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Mandelstam, Osip [NYRB Classics,2004]

by Osip Mandelstam

The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Mandelstam, Osip. Published by NYRB Classics,2004, Paperback

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Russian Literature, Classics, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1972

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

To the talent even insomnia can be productive…

Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails.
I have counted half the catalogue of ships:
That caravan of cranes, that expansive host,
Which once rose above Hellas.

Antiquity and modernity, ancient times and nowadays – in a single stanza Osip Mandelstam establishes a link between eras making his poetry timeless.

When the city moon looks out on the streets,
And slowly lights the impenetrable town,
And darkness swells, full of melancholy and bronze,
And songs of wax are smashed by the harshness of time;
And the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower,
And the ashen woman descends to reap the dead world,
Quietly scattering huge spokes of shadow,
And strews yellowing straw across the floorboards…

Imagery, tropes, metaphors, symbolism and allegory: in the hands of a master, they are capable to work miracles.

We exist, without sensing our country beneath us,
Ten steps away our words evaporate,
But where there are enough for half a conversation
We always commemorate the Kremlin’s man of the mountains.
His fat fingers slimy as worms,
His words dependable as weights of measure.
His cockroach moustache chuckles,
His top-boots gleam.

It isn’t often that the poesy is priced so dear. Osip Mandelstam was a genius who paid with his life for his poetry.

[Steve]

Osip Mandelstam in the eyes of the NKVD


The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave
of its breathing.


Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was born in Warsaw to a wealthy Jewish family that was sufficiently well connected to be allowed residence in St. Petersburg and to enroll young Osip in the elite Tenishev School (in which the very aristocratic Vladimir Nabokov would matriculate a decade later). Like most Russian intellectuals Mandelstam welcomed the Revolution, but earlier than most he distrusted and then despised the Bolsheviks who purged their way to the levers of power. His friend and fellow Acmeist (an "ism" in which the Imagists could have recognized themselves), Nikolay Gumilev, was placed before a firing squad already in 1921, so Mandelstam would have been in trouble even if he didn't openly detest the new regime. His travails in the gulag and in exile are well known due to his wife's, Nadezhda's, famous memoir Hope Against Hope and need not be rehearsed here.

Mandelstam and Alexander Blok are regarded by some experts as the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. I know little about Russian poetry, and I certainly wouldn't try to choose "greatest" poets when they write in a language I do not read. But I do know that one of the greatest poets of the 20th century in the German language - the Romanian born Paul Celan - was deeply moved and influenced by Mandelstam's poems, which is more than enough recommendation for me. In fact, Celan published the first book length selection of translations of Mandelstam's poetry into a European language in 1959. This book I have finally read,(*) along with English language translations of Mandelstam's poetry by a collaboration of the Mandelstam specialist, Clarence Brown, and the well known American poet, W.S. Merwin.(**)

Most of my favorite 20th century poets wrote at least a few translations, and though the bulk of Mandelstam's translations were forced upon him in order to be able to eat while he was banned from publishing his own work or in the midst of his own poetic doldrums, he also wrote some translations in order to become intimately familiar with an admired poet's craft, to ingest and incorporate it into his own voice. That the translation also resonates with the translator's voice and diction can hardly surprise(***), and Celan's differ quite markedly from Merwin/Brown's. Consider for a moment these two versions of a very early poem from 1908:

Christmas trees burn in the forest with gilded flames,
toy wolves glare from the bushes -

O my prophetic sadness,
O my calm freedom,
and the dead crystal vault of heaven laughing without end!


Der Tannen weihnachtliches Leuchten,
der Wälder Flittergold.
Der Spielzeugwolf, der im Gesträuche
mit seinen Augen rollt.

O weise Schwermut, wohlberedte,
o Freiheit, fern dem Schall.
Des Firmaments, des unbelebten, steten,
hohnsprechender Kristall!

In Celan's book the original is placed en face, so one can see that Mandelstam wrote this poem in two quatrains with rhyme scheme abba. Clearly the Americans have taken much liberty in both respects, while Celan saved more than a hint of the structure, though at the cost of giving the wolves incongruously rolling eyes instead of ferocious ones. The final couplet is pure Celan. Indeed, one sees in Mandelstam's poems relatively little punctuation, but Celan's translations are full of commas, colons and dashes that give the poems a slow, irregular rhythm focusing the reader's attention more fully on the sounds and the cumulative effect characteristic of middle and late period Celan.

But my primary purpose here is not to compare the translations, though I do prefer Celan's. And I deliberately distracted you with this comparison using the example of a very minor piece. Enough of that. What about the original work in so far as I can triangulate it behind the screen of different translators and languages?

The earliest poems in these collections, written when Mandelstam was 17/18 years old, such as the poem above, are rigorously rhymed, short, distilled and mysterious. But his poetic rhetoric soon expanded to include narrative and personae along with his emotion-laden images, resulting in some strong multiple page poems like "The Horseshoe Finder." He wrote delightful apostrophes to some of his favorite historical figures (like Lamarck) - in which he exercised some of the idiosyncratic ideas I briefly noted in my review of his Journey to Armenia - and moving elegies to disappeared contemporaries (like Andrei Bely). Greco-Roman allusions are made frequently, and all thought is associative. As the reader moves through his work (both volumes present the work chronologically), the increasing weight of despair and outbursts of defiance begin to predominate. As I mentioned in my review of his Journey to Armenia, there were times when this weight crushed all the poetry out of him. The wonder is that he was able to find his poetic sources again and again.

I'll give Mandelstam the last word, in a poem from 1931 written after one of his stints in the gulag.

No, I was no one's contemporary ----ever.
That would have been above my station.
How I loathe that other with my name.
He certainly never was me.

The age is a despot with two sleepy apples
to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth.
When he dies he'll subside onto the numb
arm of his son, who's already ageing.

As the age was born I opened my red eyelids,
My eyes were large sleepy apples.
The rivers thundered, informing me
of the bloodshot lawsuits of men.

A hundred years back,
on the camp-bed, on a drift of pillows,
there was a sprawled clay body: the age
getting over its first drunk.

What a frail bed, when you think
how the world creaks on its journey.
Well, we can't forge another.
We'd better get along with this one.

In stuffy rooms, in cabs, in tents,
the age is dying. Afterwards
flames will flutter like feathers, on the apple-skins,
on the curled wafers of horn.


(*) Gedichte. Aus dem Russischen übertragen von Paul Celan

(**) The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (1973). This volume also contains a translation of Mandelstam's essay about the poetics of one of his favorite poets, Dante Alighieri.

(***) This is one of the reasons why I resolved some time ago to read multiple translations of poetry, when available.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine fingers quiver;
A fragile body breathes:
A boat sliding across
Fathomless silent seas.
*
The sea’s chest breathes calmly,
But the mad day sparkles
And the foam’s pale lilac
In its bowl of turbid blue.
[...]
Like the shadow of sudden clouds,
A visitor from the sea swoops down
And, nipping past, whispers
Along embarrassed shores.

An enormous sail austerely soars;
Dead-white, the wave shrinks back –
And once more will not dare
To touch the shore;

And the boat, rustling through the waves
As though through leaves …
*
And if truly sung,
Wholeheartedly, at last
Everything vanishes, nothing is left
But space, and stars, and singer.

Who can know from the word goodbye
What kind of parting is in store for us,
*
Have I got drunk on doors that lock me out? –

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreword, by Nadezhda Mandelshtam
Foreword, by Donald Davie
Translator's Preface
Introduction, by Donald Rayfield

from Stone (1913, 1916, 1923 and 1928)
--The careful muffled sound
--Suddenly, from the dimly lit hall
--To read only children's books
--On pale-blue enamel
--What shall I do with the body I've been given
--A sadness beyond words
--Words are unnecessary
--Silentium
--Ear-drums stretch their sensitive sail
--Like the shadow of sudden clouds
--I grew, rustling like a reed
--Sultry dusk covers the couch
--How slowly the horses move
--Light sows a meagre beam
--The sea-shell
--I hate the light
--In the haze your image
--No, not the moon, but a bright clock-face
--The traveller
--The casino
--The Lutheran
--Hagia Sophia
--Notre Dame
--Poisoned bread, satiated air
--Horses' hooves ... The clatter
--There are orioles in the woods
--Nature is Roman, and mirrored in Rome
--Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails
--Herds of horses gaily neigh or graze

Unpublished in the Struve/Filippov editions
--Newly reaped ears

Two poems first published by Struve/Filippov, 1964
--The hunters have trapped you
--The old men of Euripides, an abject throng

from Tristia (1922)
--How the splendour of these veils and of this dress
--We shall die in transparent Petropolis
--This night is irredeemable
--Disbelieving the miracle of resurrection
--Out of the bottle the stream of golden honey poured so slowly
--Spring's transparent-grey asphodels
--Tristia
--Sisters: heaviness and tenderness bear the same insignia
--Return to the incestuous lap
--When Psyche -- life -- descends among shades
--I have forgotten the word I wanted to say
--For the sake of delight
--Here is the pyx, like a golden sun
--Because I had to let go of your arms
--When the city moon looks out on the streets
--When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped
--I like the grey silences under the arches

from Poems (1928)
--I was washing at night in the courtyard
--To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch
--Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips
--As the leaven swells
--I climbed into the tousled hayloft
--My time
--Whoever finds a horseshoe
--1 January 1924

Two poems published in Novy Mir (1931 and 1932)
--Armenia
--Batyushkov

Poems published posthumously
--Self-portrait
--I was only in a childish way connected with the established order
--Help me, O Lord, to get through this night
--For the resounding glory of eras to come
--I drink to the blossoming epaulette
--Impressionism
--Ariosto
--We exist, without sensing our country beneath us
--The body of King Arshak is unwashed
--Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges
--Black earth
--Yes, I'm lying in the earth, moving my lips
--You took away my seas and running jumps and sky
--My country conversed with me
--For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights
--A wave advances -- one wave breaking another's backbone
--I shall perform a smoky rite
--I shall not return my borrowed dust
--I can't make sense of today
--Like a belated present
--I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world
--You still haven't died, you're still not alone
--I look the frost in the face, alone
--Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes
--Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger
--Don't compare: anyone alive is matchless
--What has contended with oxide and alloys
--The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance
--Listening, listening to the early ice
--A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp
--Where can I put myself this January?
--Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark
--Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue
--I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry
--Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe
--Armed with the eyesight of narrow wasps
--I am plunged into a lion's den, a fort
--If our enemies take me
--Life's reticulations loosen, madness looms
--This is what I want most of all
--This azure island was exalted by its potters
--As if words were not enough
--I raise this greenness to my lips
--With her delightful uneven way of walking

Notes and Acknowledgements
Further Reading

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm at a loss for words about these astonishing stanzas. Concise, swift, and unflinching, they're saturated by a sort of black sun beauty. Steeped in Greek mythology and Dante's verses, Mandelstam was thrust into exile by Stalin and unwillingly became a poet of desperation and abandonment, writing stinging lines about what happens when history decides to grind your mind and body into dust. There are echoes of Paul Celan here, but Mandelstam's poetry in this superb translation offers its own singular rhythms. I wish I could physically push this slim book into YOUR hands, the way I wish somebody had slipped it into mine years ago.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

My interest in Osip Mandelstam was initially piqued when I learned that he had a whirlwind love affair with my homegirl Marina Tsvetaeva in 1916. Brief though it was, this liaison was the inspiration for Tsvetaeva's bittersweet poem "Where does such tenderness come from?" (link), which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1973. Funny how these short-lived sexual connections, these absent-minded stirrings of one type of brine with another, end up leaving such a huge footprint on the universe.

My copy of Mandelstam's "Selected Poems" was brought out by the same publishing house from whence issued my copy of Tsvetaeva's "Selected Poems" (i.e., Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics -- those sea-green paperbacks whose glossy covers are so pleasant to stroke with one's entire hand).

On the cover of Marina's book, there is a black-and-white photo of Marina herself, unsmiling, with thick dark eyebrows and a timeless Cleopatra-esque haircut.

On the cover of Osip's book, there is an abstract painting of a red rectangle superimposed on a background of wavy blue and gray lines.

Why such a difference?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Marina's poetry is largely autobiographical -- and sometimes even egoistical, in the best sense of the word:

"In a world where most people
are hunched and sweaty
I know only one person
equal to me in strength."

In contrast, Osip's poetry often seems to take a broader, more cosmopolitan, more historical perspective, and his poetic voice is sometimes self-deprecating and self-effacing:

"I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice."

The texture of Marina's poetry is often harsh and jagged and wild, whereas Osip's neoclassicism-tinted poetry is almost always confined within marble columns of rhyme and meter.

Of course, this assessment of Marina's and Osip's differences is overly simplistic: it is easy to argue that these two Russian giants in fact have more similarities than differences. Like Tsvetaeva's, Mandelstam's poetry is built around an autobiographical framework (his is the archetypal tale of a poet who seals his own fate by opposing his homeland's tyrannical government). Like Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam is not deficient in self-worth and sometimes even displays a fair amount of braggadocio ("My blood is not wolf's blood/And only an equal shall kill me"). Both Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam enjoy incorporating Greek myths into their poetry: Tsvetaeva likens herself to the star-crossed Amazon queen Penthesilea, while Mandelstam compares himself and his wife Nadezhda to that most primal of mixed-race couples, Zeus and Europa.

I think I will be returning to these poems again and again.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not in favor of premeditated happiness:
Sometimes nature is a grey blemish
And I'm sentenced, slightly tipsy,
To taste the colors of impoverishment.

One should give this ten stars and then beg for forgiveness. This verse is electric. It crackles in one’s stomach. The eyes water and the tongue tics nervously as one whispers aloud. Don’t abdicate the reading, allow Mandelstram his viral bloom, however overdue. Be wary. The potency of the dose can be lethal. Short of such, it echoes, scrawled in golden sun and alongside the crunch of leaves and sundered branch. This verdant smell of the eternal comes at odds against the tribal. Be warned, the dose can be lethal.

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first poem here was written/published when Mandelstam was around seventeen or eighteen and is, like most of the poems of his earlier years, on nature and ephemerality.

The shy speechless sound
of a fruit falling from its tree,
and around it the silent music
of the forest, unbroken…

As the years go by, a world war, a revolution, and what at the very least can be called violent suppression, occur and the poems focus more on violence, betrayal, despair, so that even reflections of images and memories of better times dissipate.

O Lord, help me live through this night—
I’m in terror for my life, your slave:
to live in Petersburg is to sleep in a grave.

Mandelstam didn’t escape the censorship, surveilling, arrests, imprisonments, and death that faced poets and artists and others in the Soviet Union under Stalin. That he still had courage to write and recite poetry that spoke directly to the terror and the sycophancy of those around Stalin is unbelievable. Of course, he paid for it dearly with arrest and exile and the conditions of poverty caused by this, and later imprisonment and death, but one of the most touching things I’ve ever read is this part of a poem that alludes to his wife Nadezhda, who memorized a lot of his poetry and kept his work and story alive even after his death, and their misery.

You’re still alive, you’re not alone yet—
she’s still beside you, with her empty hands,
and a joy reaches you both across immense plains
Through mists and hunger and flying snow.

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Mandelstam é considerado ao lado de Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetáieva e Anna Akhmátova uma das mais importantes vozes da poesia russa do século XX."

Devo estar a ficar balhelha!
Nem um só poema consegui entender...
E as voltas que dei ao livro para escolher um para aqui?
Deixo o que "Anna Akhmátova qualificou como «o melhor poema de amor do século XX»."
Até estou com medo de ler o livro de Akhmátova que aí tenho...

"Mestra dos olhares culpados, dona
dos ombros pequenos! Tens domada
a perigosa índole masculina —
de ti não vem a naufragada-fala.

Nadam peixes inflando as guelras,
vermelhas barbatanas: pega-lhes, pronto!
Em silêncio dizem "o" com as bocas,
dá-lhes a comer o meio pão do corpo!

Não somos peixes vermelho-dourados,
nosso costume fraterno tem outras sinas:
no corpo quente, costelas magras e o brilho
húmido e inútil das pupilas.

Marcam o rumo fatal cílios-sementes
de papoila...Então por que me arrebata,
como a janíçaro, esta volátil, vermelha,
breve meia-lua humilde dos lábios?...

Não te zangues, turca adorada,
eu meto-me contigo no saco tenebroso,
engulo tuas palavras obscuras,
beberei por ti a água esconsa.

És socorro, Maria, de quem morre.
Há que adormecer, a morte prevenindo.
Aqui me fico, no limiar severo —
vai-te embora, vai, fica ainda..."

2 estrelas = "não gostei"; ≠ de "é mau".
É apenas muito difícil (para mim, claro) porque, além da linguagem simbólica, Osip utiliza muitas referências literárias, musicais, mitológicas, históricas,...
Простите мое невежество, Осип Мандельштам!

[Mamadreza · Rating 3 out of 5]

عصر من، ترجمه ی فرید قدمی از نشر مانیاهنر را خواندم... مهمترین ضعف عدم انسجام در انتخاب اشعار بود.


سکوت:
دزدکی و یواش
می‌شود رها میوه از درخت
و صداش
در سکوت شرف جنگل
سکوت، این آواز بی پایان.


خورشید!:
دور می‌شوند از هم آدمها
پاشیده می‌شود از هم
کم کم، صفوف انسانی.
من ناپدید می شوم اینجا،
از فراموش، بیشتر چیزی!
از نو طلوع میکنم اما من
توی حرف های عاشقانه و بازی بچه ها
از نو، می شوم پدید
تا بگویم: خورشید!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great literature cuts the ground from under your feet. If you think you understand wholly, you are deluding yourself. As Osip Mandelstam writes in the single prose piece in this collection, an essay entitled "Conversations About Dante":

It is only very conditionally possible to speak of poetic speech or thought as sonorous, for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, and of these one, taken by itself, is absolutely mute, while the other, taken apart from its instrumental metamorphosis, is devoid of all significance and all interest and is subject to paraphrase, which is in my opinion the truest sign of the absence of poetry. For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.

Repeatedly, as I read the poems in this collection, I had to confess my inadequacy. I would read a stanza, say to myself that it was great, and start wondering wherein that great lay. Some lines hit you like a sledgehammer wielded with immense force, such as in this lines written while the poet was imprisoned in Siberia:

You took alway all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

Then there are the striking images, as in Poem 129 written in 1922:

The scalp tingles with cold.
Nobody speaks out.
Time pares me away
Like the heel of your shoe.

Life overcomes life.
The sound fades out.
Something is always missing.
There's no time to remember it.

You know, it was better before.
But there's no comparing
how the blood used to whisper
and how it whispers.

It's plain that some purpose
is moving these lips.
The tree-top laughs and plays
into the day of the axes.

What an image! I think I will find myself coming back to these poems because they continue to resonate. As I do not know Russian, I cannot evaluate the translation by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. To the extent that it repeatedly stops me in my tracks, wondering, it is highly successful.

[Anima]

"
I shall not return my borrowed dust
To the earth,
Like a white floury butterfly.
I will this thinking body -
This charred, bony flesh,
Alive to its own span -
To turn into a street, a country. '

I look the frost in face, alone
‘Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread. ’

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apesar de achar Tristia a grande obra-prima do Mandelstam, não tem como não se emocionar com sua poesia póstuma que envolve toda a poesia feita durante a perseguição stalinista, provando mais uma vez que quem gosta de arte não pode nem remotamente simpatizar com o stalinismo e o que os poetas sofreram na União Soviética é motivo suficiente pra isso.

*Não dou cinco estrelas porquea tradução foi muito fragmentada.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a moving work, especially considering the historical context of the revolution and subsequent Gulag. How Mandelstam continued writing such beautiful poems as the world around him disintegrated is a mystery. I will never forget the experience of reading these poems in my warm house on a safe street. I know this could all be gone in a breath, and for Mandelstam it happened.

[Mike Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

from NOÖ [14]:

Read a lot of this on a bus in the fog and drizzle of a deeply enwintered Massachusetts. Osip Mandelstam was a Russian through the busy times: the Revolution, Stalinism, wars. He died in a gulag. You can tell he knew the dirt and the wine both without lying. You can tell he liked clapping until his cheeks turned red. You can tell he liked weeping enspooned with a beautiful woman as they both lay on a frozen lake and withstood the wind that was keeping the ice below them from giving way. You can tell he liked whispering to bears instead of riding them. I finished this book exhausted on a train, and everything I dog-eared was because it named a feeling I’d felt namelessly before, like: “After midnight the heart picks the locked silence / right out of your hands.” To bring it full around: “After midnight the heart has its banquet, / gnawing on a silvery mouse.”

[Joaco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry, but this book was something else. I am coming here from Tolstaya's The Slynx and it was totally worth it. I have copied below some excerpts from three different poems I really liked:

This one had a hugely emotional impact on me, I could almost feel his regret bleeding through the page:

I could not keep your hands in my own,
I failed the salt tender lips,
so I must wait now for dawn in the timbered Acropolis.
How I loathe the ageing stockades and their tears.


This one was written during his time living in Ukraine while the great famine was going on. He was living in Stary krym:

Nature wouldn't know her own face.
From the Ukraine, the Kuban, terrible ghosts.
And the famished peasants, in felt shoes,
stand guard at their gates, never touching the rings.


And the poem which landed him on jail, tortured, and mentally broke him:

But whenever there's a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

An excellent author. Also, he read Poe's poems which is was a great surprise as well because he referenced some of them. Even if you do not like poetry, it would be a good option to try it out.

[Kate Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandelstam once said: "Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" He wrote some non-conforming stanzas and ergo died in transit to a Soviet labor camp, after living for years in exile. (My favorite line of his about Stalin is: "He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. / He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.")

I don't love Mandelstam's early poetry, about honey and tree boughs and birds in flight. So I'm also complicit, because what morphs these words into magic is his terror. Instead of musing on Persephone's bees he begins to write:

No, it’s not for me to duck out of the mess
behind the cabdriver’s back that’s Moscow.
I’m the cherry swinging from the streetcar strap of an evil time. What am I doing alive?

We’ll take Streetcar A and then Streetcar B,
you and I, to see who dies first.

His work is spectacular.

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

It may be, night, you do not need me;
Out of the world’s abyss,
Like a shell without pearls,
I am cast on your shores.
Indifferently, you stir the waves
And immitigably sing;
But you shall love and cherish
This equivocal, unnecessary shell.
You shall lie down on the sand close by,
Apparelled in your raiment,
And bind to the shell
The colossal bell of the billows.
And your whispering spray shall fill,
With wind and rain and mist,
The walls of the brittle shell –
A heart where nobody dwells …
---


Where a Roman judged a foreign people
A basilica stands and, first and joyful
Like Adam once, an arch plays with its own ribs:
Groined, muscular, never unnerved.
From outside, the bones betray the plan:
Here flying buttresses ensure
That cumbersome mass shan’t crush the walls –
A vault bold as a battering-ram is idle.
Elemental labyrinth, unfathomable forest,
The Gothic soul’s rational abyss,
Egyptian power and Christian shyness,
Oak together with reed – and perpendicular as tsar.
But the more attentively I studied,
Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold,
The more I thought: I too one day shall create
Beauty from cruel weight
---


There are orioles in the woods,
and length of vowels Is the sole measure in accentual verse.
But only once a year is nature lengthily protracted
And overflowing, as in Homer’s measure.
This day yawns like a caesura:
Quiet since morning, and arduous duration;
Oxen at pasture, and a golden indolence
To extract from the reed one whole note’s richness
---


Some on their coins depict a lion,
Others a head;
Various tablets of brass, of gold and bronze
Lie with equal honour in the earth.
The century, trying to bite through them, left its teeth-marks there.
Time pares me down like a coin,
And there is no longer enough of me for myself
---


Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges, Redden under scourges and to burn in frosts.
Your child-like arms are to lift heavy irons,
To lift heavy irons and to sew mail-bags.
Your tender soles are to walk barefoot on glass,
Barefoot on glass and blood-stained sand
And I am here to burn for you like a black candle,
Burn like a black candle and not dare to pray.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy is so dog-eared it can't even stay closed unless its wedged between two other objects.

[Ipsita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Osip Mandelstam’s poetry is lyrical and experimental albeit it was simple enough to make me (a novice who has no background in literature) understand the intricate imagery in his verse. It makes you think about the immense possibilities of language, of linguistics in justifying our emotional capacities because he achieves this feat through sheer simplicity coupled with profound observations. The translator’s preface was an interesting addition wherein terms like acemism and Mandelstam’s involvement in it was explained though he was a true non-conformist at heart. Overall, it was a rewarding experience to read him and needless to say, his poetry will stay with me for a long time to come. I feel like Mandelstam has defined a new path for a magnificent and revolutionary style of poetry. This was my favourite verse and it resonated with me exceptionally –

I thought – no need for speeches:
We are not prophets nor precursors,
We do not delight in heaven nor live in fear of hell,
In dull noon we burn like candles.

Additionally, I have included all the other poems which were too beautiful to be not mentioned and mainly, to never be forgotten:

To read only children’s books, treasure
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.
I’m tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it’s the only one I’ve seen.
In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.


What shall I do with the body I’ve been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?
For the quiet happiness of breathing, being able
To be alive, tell me to whom I should be grateful?


Let the moment’s condensation vanish without trace:
The cherished pattern no one can efface.


A sadness beyond words
Opened two huge eyes,
The vase of flowers woke up
And its crystal made a splash.

The whole room filled
With languor – that sweet medicine!
Such a small kingdom
To swallow so much sleep.


Words are unnecessary,
There being nothing to learn:
How sad and exemplary
Is an animal’s dark heart!

It has no urge to instruct
And no use for words,
And swims like a young dolphin
Along the grey gulfs of the world.


The sea’s chest breathes calmly,
But the mad day sparkles
And the foam’s pale lilac
In its bowl of turbid blue.

May my lips attain
The primordial muteness,
Like a crystal-clear sound
Immaculate since birth!

Remain foam, Aphrodite,
And – word – return to music;
And, fused with life’s core,
Heart be ashamed of heart! (Silentium)


I am overcome by dread
In the face of mysterious heights;
I’m satisfied by a swallow in the sky
And I love the way a bell-tower soars!

I feel I am the age-old traveller
Who, on bending planks, above the abyss,
Listens to the snowball grow
And eternity strike on stone clocks.

If it could be! But I am not that wayfarer
Flickering against faded leaves:
True sadness sings in me.

There’s an avalanche in the hills!
And all my self is in the bells,
Though music cannot save one from the abyss!


I’m not in favour of premeditated happiness:
Sometimes nature is a grey blemish
And I’m sentenced, slightly tipsy,
To taste the colours of impoverishment.

The wind is playing with a tousled cloud,
The anchor scrapes the ocean bottom;
My mind, lifeless as linen,
Hangs over nothingness.

But I like the casino on the dunes:
The vast view from the misty window,
A thin ray of light on the crumpled tablecloth;

And, with greeny water all around,
When, like a rose, the wine is in its glass,
I like to follow the sea-gull’s wings!




When I am old may my sadness gleam.
I was born in Rome; it has come back to me;
Kind Autumn was my she-wolf
And August – month of the Caesars – smiled on me.


The hunters have trapped you:
Stag, the forests shall mourn!

You can have my black coat, sun,
But preserve my living power!


We are afraid, we do not dare
To succour the imperial grief.
Stung by Theseus, night fell on him.
We shall bring the dead home with our burial chant;
We shall cool the black sun
Of its savage, insomniac passion.


And memory’s huge flag –
Bird of death and mourners –
Trails its black borders
Over the cypress stern.


Oh how meagre life’s weft,
How threadbare the language of rejoicing!
Everything existed of old, everything happens again,
And only the moment of recognition is sweet.


Man dies, the hot sand cools.
Yesterday’s sun is borne on a black litter.


I am left with one care only, a golden one:
To free myself from the burden of time.


Let the conspirators, like sheep, speed over the snow.
Let the brittle snow-crust crack.
Winter – to some – is a lodging of wormwood and acrid smoke,
To some the stern salt of ceremonial wounds.


Oh to raise a lantern on a long stick,
Under the salt of stars to follow a dog,
And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard.
But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.


Mowers bring back
Goldfinches fallen from their nests.
I shall wring loose from these burning lines,

Get back to the order of sound where I belong,
To the blood’s grass-like and ringing connection,
Nerving myself for the dream beyond reason.


To wrench our age out of prison
A flute is needed
To connect the sections
Of disarticulated days …

And buds shall swell again,
Shoots splash out greenly.
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful century.
With an idiot’s harsh and feeble grin
You look behind:
A beast, once supple,
Ponders its paw-marks in the sand.


I look the frost in the face, alone –
It’s going nowhere, I come from nowhere –
And always the breathing wonder of the plain
Ironed, folded without a crease.


Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger,
What can we do with the murderous plains?
Surely what we deem to be their openness
We ourselves – falling asleep – behold;
And everywhere the questions swell – where do they go,
And where do they come from?
And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep
Slowly crawling across them –
The space for Judases not yet born.


And I gasp after them, yelling
At some frozen wood-pile:
Just a reader, someone to speak with, a doctor!
A conversation on the bitter stairs!


I’ve gone into the depths of time –
And found it numb.


Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe –
In the pupil a cuckoo, a drop of dew –

Now barely able to pick out, in full magnitude,
The lonely multitude of stars.


If our enemies take me
And people stop talking to me,
If they confiscate the whole world –
The right to breathe, open doors,
Affirm that existence shall go on
And that the people, like a judge, shall judge,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,


Only let it be now on earth, and not in heaven,
As in a house full of music. –
If only we don’t scare or wound them –
It would be pleasant to survive.


Forgive me for what I’m telling you;
Quietly, quietly read it back to me.

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit I picked up this book in a second hand shop with no expectations other than I should read some Mandelstam. I ended up really loving his writing. Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 and is considered to be one of the great Russian poets of the era. He died in 1938 on his way to a Siberian labour camp.

Mandelstam's poetry is lyrical and thoughtful and in this edition beautifully translated by Clarence Brown and W S Merwin (the new USA poetry Laureate). Most of the poems in this selection are not titled but are given numbers.

There is a very high level of political engagement in Mandelstam's poetry and a strong feeling for nature. Some of his poems draw a picture of a Nature pushed to the margins and almost seem prophetic, for example, 116 talks about the plight of the bees:

For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

***************************

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

Osip Mandelstam - Selected Poems translated by Clarence Brown and W S Merwin and published by Penguin

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always used to carry the select Osip in my pocket. A profound poet. The works by his partner are a feat of memory and love that is simply monumental .

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mandelstam leans to the Classics and humanism. He often evokes the individual/poet engaging truth through the past/tradition. His images are strong.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Thought I'd run through these today what a curious man I should get my hands on a Russian selected at some point. Would be worthwhile tracing the development of OM in relation to Ezra Pound for reasons that become clear.

These are deft and piercing even in translation. There's a consciousness of this. His Grecian slant in the earlier collections - I'll cautiously call it an address to the Sapphic poets of antiquity as I do think I noticed a sly reference to Anyte of Tegea as well as Sappho - does of course make one think of Pound's Lustra . Perhaps perhaps

[Jack Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstram

“Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance. I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books much loved, and in children's games I shall rise from the dead to say the sun is shining.”

Reading this was a humbling experience, and this will not be a great review because, in all honesty, I was out of my depths here. My re-entry into poetry has been a rocky one, and this collection of poems has made me realize that I need much more time and focus to strengthen my appreciation and understanding of this literary genre. 

In the first half of this collection, Mandelstram is fascinated and inspired by the myths and legends of the ancient Mediterranean world. He places us among its seasides, mountainsides and firesides of a time forgotten or imagined. It's hypnotic and disorienting. In the second half of the collection, "Poems From the Thirties," the work evokes an incredible sense of dread and urgency, with touches of anger and paranoia, as if written by someone on the run or under a watchful eye. If I took anything from this, it is just another sad example of an artist whose life was continuously disrupted and ended by forces of political oppression. 

[Vurt]

I don’t think I got much out of this, the generational, knowledge and language gaps are far too much for me to appreciate it at the level it probably deserves.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Osip Mandelstam was a member of the Guild of Poets, aka Acmeism, an early 20th-century Russian literary movement with other recognizable names such as Anna Akhmatova. Mandelstam's anti-establishment poetry was difficult to publish and after denouncing Stalin in 1934 he was sent into exile (his first but not last experience). The thing about Russian poetry (specifically of the non-conformist variety) is that is deliciously dark, and cold, and real:

O Lord, help me to live through this night -
I'm in terror for my life, your slave:
to live in Petersburg is to sleep in a grave.

The big difficulty I have with excerpted poetry in collections such as this is that I am always wondering what I am missing. I have a problem with someone telling me how I should read something, so reading a selection of someone else's choices makes me grumble inside. However, for a first experience in reading Mandelstam I have to say the choices here were quite yummy and it certainly makes me want to read his full poetry. Extra-delicious is Conversation about Dante included at the end.

Meow!

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are the opening lines of one of his poems:

Hagia Sophia: here, God himself decreed
Nations and kings to stop! As witness eyes
In words, your ancient cupola is indeed,
As if on a chain, suspended from the skies.

Across the centuries, Justinian’s example
Shines: Diana of Ephesus abets
The theft of 107 columns in green marble
For the benefit of those alien gods.

[Costin Ivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Catrenul favorit:
„Piedici nu-s, regrete nu-s,
Doar lumini pe stâlpi, în sus;
Dintr-o zare-n altă zare,
Cresc zemoase felinare...”

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know there were notes. Of the fourteenth poem, Silentium, from the collection, Stone, the first note says it ’begins with literally a pregnant silence’, ‘She who has not yet been born’. The undivulged noun the pronoun refers to was in the poet’s mind but since ‘she’ is ‘both word and music’, and he’s a poet, one may assume ‘she’ is poetry, in embryo, and, because both word and music, she is, ‘the imperishable link between everything living’. Hardly. This is on a par with Shelley’s poets are the legislators of mankind. ‘The sea’s chest breathes calmly’ of the second stanza is a metaphor for life, inchoate, unarticulating if you like, but ‘the mad day sparkles’, making for foam, love in embryo. I keep wanting a verb to tell what the foam does. In the third stanza the poet intrudes, ‘May my lips attain the primordial muteness.’ He wants, paradoxically, to articulate silence, besides which everything so far expressed is but froth. Love, in the fourth stanza, has to stay in embryo and ‘word – return to music’ from which it has presumably been separated until he comes along, hopefully to uniquely express their reunion. Syntactically it isn’t – his – word with music ‘fused with life’s core’ but - his -‘Heart’ which he exhorts to ‘be ashamed of heart!’ Well, it’s a lame conclusion, a falsely ringing would-be resolution, like a journalist rounding off his piece with an apparent paradox, whereby his heart, wedded to life’s core, should be ashamed of love. Aphrodite is after all goddess of both art and love, one or the other, but she’s not been born in this poem. I have the feeling what he wants is to speak the unconscious ‘like a crystal clear sound immaculate since’ – its – ‘birth’, in him.

Maybe. In The sea-shell he’s like a shell without pearls’ cast on night’s shores and it’s night fills the walls of the shell, night’s sound its heart, his pearl, his poetry.

He overuses the word, transparent. In ‘We shall die in transparent Petropolis’ it means see-through like a shade since Petropolis stands in for St Petersburg, perhaps Persepolis, and necropolis, where Proserpina is tsar ‘and every hour is the anniversary of our’ – living – ‘death’, before the revolution.

The summation of poem 90 is better than that for Silentium: ‘Take from me these grains of sand: I’m pouring them from hand to hand’, evoking an image of continuing loss of memories of a love lost he’s giving to the lost lover. 92 has eye-catching lines: ‘After tea we came into the great brown garden, dark blinds lowered like eyelids on the windows’, the colour of tea continued in ‘brown’ and ‘dark’. ‘And leaving his ship, canvas worn out on the seas, Odysseus came back, filled with time and space,’ when his canvas can no longer fulfil. 113 ‘But I have forgotten what I wanted to say and a thought without flesh flies back to its palace of shadows.’ 116 Take ‘this simple necklace of dead dried bees’ his words? once kisses? ‘that turned honey into sun.’

126 ‘Starlight, like salt on an axe-head.’ ‘A star melts, like salt, in the barrel.’ But he does go on to use the word ‘salt’ too much. I wonder if reading him out loud, as for Dylan Thomas, the sound might not make the sense. It’s a shock so elusive a poet should in 286 be so explicitly attacking Stalin, in 1933, ‘his fat fingers slimy as worms.’ Maybe he thought Stalin would appreciate the art rather than be snagged on the content. As I know from the writing group, this is unlikely. The introduction does remark his suicidal spirit. An editor had defied the censor to publish the lampoon. The notes say it led to the poet’s arrest. Stalin took a keen interest in poetry, having been a poet himself. Later poems, in praise of Stalin, ring false. Prokofiev did better with Zdravista where music has the edge in the union with words. But if Stalin hadn’t crushed Mandelshtam, keeping him isolated but preserved, the ‘riff-raff of scraggy-necked chiefs’ he’d played with surely would. 380 ‘Forgive me for what I’m telling you; quietly, quietly read it back to me.’