Journey to Armenia

by Osip Mandelstam, Henry Gifford (Introduction), Sidney Monas (Translator)

The last published work of a great poet who wrote a few lines attacking Stalin and was shortly thereafter exiled to Siberia where he died near Vladivostok six years later. An inimitable volume, Journey to Armenia is a travel book in name only.Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay, he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture.This edition also includes the companion piece, “Conversation About Dante,” which Seamus Heaney called “Osip Mandelstam’s astonishing fantasia on poetic creation.” An incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and a challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, the essay was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934 and 1935, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to Journey to Armenia.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Russia, Poetry, History, Classics, Russian Literature

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1931

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

[Steve]

Sevanavank monastery on an island in Sevan Lake, Armenia


In 1930 Osip Mandelstam was deep in the bouillabaisse - only Bukharin's protection held the Soviet authorities off of him, a vindictive bureaucrat was taxing him for plagiarism, and his internal sources of poetic inspiration had been dry for five years already. To put some food on his plate and to get him out of Moscow and away from his enemies, Bukharin arranged a trip to Armenia for Mandelstam and his infinitely loyal wife, Nadezhda. He was supposed to produce a text demonstrating how socialist progress had made great strides in that particular backwater.(*)

Well, he didn't write that text. Instead, he fabricated an episodic and impressionistic poem in prose, Journey to Armenia (1933), in which the ancient land of Armenia - outpost of Hellenism, first Christian state, vassal of Byzantium, occasional independent kingdom - helps Mandelstam find his place in time. Certainly, he found what he had needed, because after he wrote this text, his poetic sources flowed freely again, and he recommenced his true calling until Bukharin could protect him no longer.

It is with an image redolent of history that Mandelstam invites the reader into his text:

On the island of Sevan, which is conspicuous for two most dignified architectural monuments that date back to the seventh century, as well as for the mud huts of flea-bitten hermits only recently passed away, thickly overgrown with nettles and thistles, but not scarier than the neglected cellars of summer houses, I spent a month enjoying the lake water that stood at a height of four thousand feet above sea level and training myself to the contemplation of the two or three dozen tombs scattered as if they were a flowerbed amidst the monastery's recently renovated dormitories.

Full of wry, fanciful little portraits of the people he met and quick snapshots of the places he visited, Journey to Armenia also records his slow realization that the murderous and paranoid Moscow environment had deformed him.

The Armenians' fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things - all this said to me: you're awake, don't be afraid of your own time, don't be sly.

But he also cuts in with whatever is on his mind: Lamarck,(**) Linnaeus, Paul Signac's "Law of Optical Blending," wild strawberries in Abkhazia, a book found under a staircase in Moscow, anything at all. In an impressionistic report on a dinner party with a gaggle of young university students he slips in this:

I don't know how it is for others, but for me a woman's charm is augmented if she happens to be a young traveler, who has spent five days of a scientific trip lying on a hard bench of the Tashkent train, who knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, who knows where she stands in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and who is not indifferent to the soybean, the cotton plant, or the chicory.

Thanks to Gifford, I know that he is not in the least ironic here. The next paragraph, which apparently wraps up the description of the dinner party, reads:

And on the table there is an elegant syntax of confused, heteroalphabetical, grammatically incorrect wildflowers, as if all the preschool forms of vegetative being were coalescing into a pleophonic anthology-poem.

I believe I can safely say that Mandelstam was an associative thinker; Gifford speaks of Mandelstam's "code" without, unfortunately, getting very far with the de-coding.

There are moments of great charm in this text full of lines like Leopards have the sly ears of punished schoolboys and passages like

Linnaeus painted his monkeys in the tenderest colonial colors. He would dip his brush in Chinese lacquers, and he would paint with brown and red pepper, with saffron, olive oil, and cherry juice. And he managed his task with dexterity and gaiety, like a barber shaving the Bürgermeister, or a Dutch housewife grinding coffee on her lap in a big-bellied coffee mill.

One certainly learns more here about Mandelstam's interests and thought processes than one does about Armenia. On the other hand, I'll bet that after a few vodkas around his kitchen table the conversations were incredible. Journey to Armenia will have to be our substitute for the real thing.


(*) Thirty years later, Vasily Grossman would find himself in a nearly identical circumstance and produced the ironic and sharply observed An Armenian Sketchbook.

(**) This edition(***) includes an essay on Mandelstam and the Journey by Henry Gifford, and one of the few useful points Gifford makes is that Mandelstam was pro-Lamarckian and anti-Darwinian, because he abhorred any form of determinism and any kind of fatalism.

(***) San Francisco, George F. Ritchie, 1979

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/108...

[sigurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

smilzo volumetto, curato in maniera eccellente e con un saggio di serena vitale che da solo vale il prezzo del libro, amato da chatwin e quindi anche da me per proprietà transitiva, le pagine includono la cronaca del viaggio in armenia di mandel'stam (su invito di un suo amico che aveva subodorato il clima a lui ostile nella madrepatria), una serie di poesie dedicate all'armenia e un saggio sui naturalisti (lamarck, darwin..).
bisogna leggerlo almeno due o tre volte per afferrarne il senso, altrimenti si viene sempre sopraffatti dallo scintillio verbale, da quelle immagini sfolgoranti, da quelle analogie in contropiede che ti fanno pensare che questo libro, amalgama perfetto di diario, appunto di viaggio, saggio critico, abbia "il sapore della carne di rosei fagiani, di amare quaglie, della renna muschiata e della truffaldina lepre".
e' un libro dolentissimo, qui e là troverete drappi funebri, sete nere, coccarde luttuose (mandel'stam morirà di lì a poco in un gulag, e alla amatissima moglie furiosa per l'ingiustizia della sua prigionia dirà: sii fiera della tua patria, che uccide in nome della poesia): è il poeta che intende conoscere il suo fondo sepolcrale, e che sa che tutte le fibre del suo essere dovranno appoggiarsi all'impossibilità di scelta, all'assenza di qualunque libertà. eppure...

A Pietroburgo noi ci incontreremo ancora
come se lì avessimo sepolto il sole,
e la beata parola senza senso
pronunceremo per la prima volta.
nel nero velluto della notte sovietica,
nel velluto del vuoto universale,
cantano sempre i cari occhi di beate mogli,
fioriscono ancora fiori immortali.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that made its translator feel inadequate ("to present any writer in translation is to present him bereft of his style"), not to mention this reader. As I paged through it, I finally resolved on seeing it as a poem with paragraphlike stanzas. Some units lasted barely a sentence; some were several short paragraphs strung together.

But the poetry was incredible. The parade of images, like:

"Leopards have the sly ears of punished schoolboys."

"And I somehow saw the dance of death, the marriage dance of phosphorescent insects. First it seemed that the tips of very thin little roving cigarettes were being puffed to a glow, but their flourishes were too venturesome, free and bold."

"Parting is the younger sister of death. For those who respect fate's arguments, the rite of seeing someone off contains a sinister nuptial animation."

"Someone told the story about the man ill with Addison's disease who lay sprawled down below on the Yakimanka and leved right there: he drank vodka, read the newspaper, played dice with a passion, and at night took his wooden leg off and slept on it for a pillow"

No, this is a travel book in name only. It is the last published work of a great poet who wrote a few lines attacking Stalin and was shortly thereafter hustled off to Siberia where he died in or near Vladivostok six years later.

Read his poem, which I quote in my blog about him on Multiply.Com.

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most poetic books I've ever read.
Short and pleasant as a sip of a precious nectar.

At first I was a little bit disappointed by having found not a travel book through Armenia as I was looking for.
But then I didn't care of this lack of factual comments on places and I've been completely blew away by the capacity of Mandelstam of making poetic associations, metaphors, enjambements, juxtaposing colors and shapes.

I don't have the patience (or the talent) to read in a careful way whole books or collections of poems, but this one is something closer and never get me bored or sceptical.

It's just a pity there are very few mentions to the Armenian way of life, but clearly Mandelstam was not supposed to be a journalist there and he filled his notebooks with impressions a journalist would have missed.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lui: andiamo in Armenia
Io: ok perfetto
Lui: guarda il sito archeologico
Io: bello, ci sono resti...
Lui: le farfalle
Io: sì, ma non stavamo parlando di rovine?
Lui: Linneo! Papaveri! I papaveri sono brutti
Io: Ma no dai, a me piacc...
Lui: guarda il monastero!
Io: Aspe...
Lui: la lingua armena!
Io: sì ma...
Lui: tornati a Mosca
Io: quando?!?!
Lui: poesie!
Io: mai provato il Ritalin?

Scherzi a parte, mi sono trovata a 2/3 del libro senza sapere come. E viene voglia di tornare indietro, per rileggere più lentamente e assimilare l'entusiasmo di Mandelstam, poeta e filologo.
Forse non ho imparato poi tanto sulla geografia armena, ma ora so che è una regione che suscita eccitazione.

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un viaje por una Armenia mitológica que vive en el lenguaje. Huye de la metafísica, pero todo se codifica en lo simbólico. Así, lo sensorial satura tanto como lo abstracto. Mandelstam conversa con un artesano armenio o contempla una montaña. El artesano es muchos personajes de Grecia y Roma, la montaña es mitológica y también es muchas otras montañas, ríos y sabores. Entonces, el viaje es por el lenguaje. Uno saturado de tradición literaria clásica y de música antigua. Una sensación extraña y adictiva de inadecuación encandilada acompaña las frases. Como en los diálogos platónicos o en la tragedia griega clásica.

[Steve Middendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you remember “Three Apples Fell From The Sky” by Narine Abgaryan? I recall the almost healing air of the Caucasus Mountains. In 1930, it was strongly recommended to Osip Mandelstam, by one of his protectors, that he leave St. Petersburg and take the air in Armenia—not so much for its healing properties, more because a bullet from Moscow couldn’t reach the back of his head there. I mention Three Apples because Mandelstam informs us that THIS version of Three Apples was actually an old Armenian fairytale:

“Three apples fell from heaven: the first for the one who told the tale, the second for the one who listened, and the third for the one who understood.” (So often one book fills in my knowledge of another or leaves breadcrumbs to another.)

Journey to Armenia in only 68 pages is still three books in one: First of all, it is a travelogue that vividly returned me to the beauty, the smells, the superstitions, the pies, the preserves and the old fashioned ways of the of the little mountain hamlets of the Caucasus Mountains that I was first introduced to in Three Apples Fell From The Sky. For that, and for appreciating some of the poetry, I get an apple.

Secondly it is travel prose that could only be written by a poet, a poet of the first order:
“I managed to observe the clouds performing their devotions of Ararat. It was the descending and ascending motion of cream when it is poured into a glass of ruddy tea and roils in all directions like cumulus tubers.”
“Now I stretched out my vision and sank my eye into the wide goblet of the sea, so that every mote and tear should come to the surface.
I stretched my vision like a kid glove, stretched it onto a shoe tree, onto the blue neighbourhood of the sea...
Quickly, rapaciously, with feudal fury, I inspected the domains of my view. “
Or this:
“An inexhaustible operatic repertoire gurgled in his throat. His open-air-concert, mineral-water heartiness never left him. A sluggard with a mandolin in his soul, he lived on the string of a song, and his heart sang under the needle of a phonograph.”
Or this:
“Parting is the younger sister of death. For those who respect fate’s arguments, the rite of seeing someone off contains a sinister nuptial animation.”

Thirdly this is also a reflection of Mendelstam’s world in Stalinist Russia. It is full of references (most of which passed over my head) to his literary contemporaries both obscure and renowned. There is also carried on throughout the book a dialogue in a language understood by Russian readers of the time and students of Russian political literature; a commentary on the State, of sanctioned beliefs and sacred cows of the Regime. This too would have passed over my head had it not been called out by the editors. For example, one line that offended the censors:
“A plant in the world is an event, a happening, an arrow, and not a boring, bearded development.” This apparently referring to the appearance and ideas of Karl Marx. Another, not in this text but attributed to Mendelstam and called out by the Bruce Chatwin in the Introduction: “ ‘…the mountaineer in the Kremlin…with fat grubs for fingers.. and cockroaches on his upper lip’ …a poem recited in a closed room that let to (Mandelstam’s) arrest, exile and death in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938.“

Now a final note to Faber and Faber, to bookbinders (and their daughters) everywhere. I really loved the heft of the pages and the spiral binding of this book. Only 68 pages yet more than 10mm thick and weighing in at 228g, the pages were a joy to handle. I I loved the way the binding allowed to book to fall open, so I wasn’t constantly struggling to keep my place while pulling the covers up around my neck. I first noticed page weight in “The Complete Maus.” This was 296 pages but weighed in at 672g; nice, thick page stock and a pleasure to turn the page on so many dimensions. I also noticed page weight in another graphic novel, Still Alive, Notes From Australia’s Immigration Detention System by Safdar Ahmed. This was only my second graphic novel. Is thicker page stock a trait of this genre?

[Kitty Red-Eye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange travel book, not as much a journey to Armenia as one to the author's rich mind and assosiative and lingual powers. Best be read with a sense of humour (shouldn't everything?). Extremely quote-friendly. Short, only about 60 pages, so a quick read for whenever you feel you need "something just a little bit different".

Why this book got the editor fired in the Soviet Union, is hard to fathom. It was the Stalin era though. Maybe that's explaination enough.

[Lillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Henry Gifford gets it right in his introduction:

Always, whether in verse or prose, he expects to be met with the ready perceptiveness that Dante, as Madelstam points out, so greatly valued. "You grasp things, on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions -- this is Dante's favorite form of praise."

Mandelstam in Journey to Armenia is always on the wing.

[Diana Hale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like nothing else I have read. Seemed very timeless, flowing from one thought to another. Lots of to me fairly obtuse references but that shows the difference in educational focus in the later 20th century I guess. Very poetic in style rather than narrative.

[Claus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful book I know

[Ronan Noane K · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 ✨

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

a gift for poetry

My planned journey to Armenia next month (May 2016) holds many challenges, not the smallest of them being to overcome my fear for the work of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam. On this occasion starting – were else – with his travelogue ‘Journey to Armenia’.

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, a Jew, was born in Warsaw in 1891 and died a political prisoner in a concentration camp near Vladivostok in 1938.
His journey to Armenia took place in 1930 and was arranged by his friend and protector Nikolai Bukharin, as a trip on ‘official business’ a mission. It was not a vacation, since the end in view was a piece of writing that would be of practical use in the advancement of government policy. Mandelstam’s task was to bring back an optimistic report on the pleasure that the ancient land of Armenia was experiencing as it settled into its new Soviet identity.

Whether the intelligent Bukharin ever really expected to see such a piece of writing from the hand of his friend we will never know. What we do know is that Journey to Armenia was published in the Star (Zvezda) in 1933. That the responsible editor (censor) was sacked and that no syllable of Mandelstam thereafter was ever to be published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

In 1934 he was arrested for writing (and reading) an epigram on Stalin, ‘the Kremlin highlander’ he calls him there:
( … )
The Kremlin highlander is mentioned.
His thick fingers are fat like worms,
His words hit hard like heavy weights,
His cockroach’s huge moustaches laugh
( … )
At first Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda are forced to live in exile. But in 1938 (at the height of the Great Purge) he is sentenced to five years in a concentration camp near Vladivostok on the charge of counter revolutionary activities. It is there that on 27th of December 1938 he dies. According to the romantic views of Ilya Ehrenburg, reading the sonnets of Petrarch next to the stove. According to an anonymous correspondent; as a mad man, feeding on garbage, filthy with long grey hair and beard, dressed in tatters, the scarecrow of the camp.

The summer months of his journey to Armenia were probably his last happy months with his wife Nadezhda (Nadenka, Nadya) Yakovlevna. “Journey to Armenia” is not exactly conventional travel writing, although some passages hold description and narration, but this ‘traditional’ writing is overshadowed by meditations on painting, writing , architecture, natural science … . Many years later Nadezhda would write that the journey to Armenia had given Mandelstam back his gift for poetry.

The book seems to have a rather conventional structure. In the beginning we arrive at the exotic place promised to us by the title and in the end fading out in the classical manner of travel writing that one journey has come to an end, but will be succeeded by another yet unknown journey. (not knowing that journey would be his exile and later his imprisonment near Vladivostok, who said that real life is always stranger than our weirdest - even Mandelstam's - imagination)
In between the ‘conventional’ beginning and ending, we ‘wander’ back and forth without warning between Moscow and Armenia, between traditional narrative and meditations on art and science, life and death all in a highly personal approach. Not exactly an easy read, even tracing Mandelstam’s footsteps on the map isn’t to easy to do. I wonder if I manage to see some of his tracks back in Armenia.

Armenia and the Caucasus were for Mandelstam genuine civilization, Judaic, Hellenic, Christian on the brink of Europe and Asia. Mandelstam’s way of trying to find a ‘new reality’.

Poetry nor prose were for Mandelstam anything but a game of words, but a highly personal way of expressing, not precisely a guidebook. Leaving me nothing than to discover Armenia for myself I am afraid. (and of course thinking of Mandelstam and Armenia I cannot help trying my own ‘gift of poetry’ ;-)
 

the various shades of sound

the noise of time
the tumult of the town
the hum of the city
the murmur of the wood
the sough of the forest
the surge of the sea
the sound of the lake
the dying of the stream

the swoosh of Nike’s wings

[Ffiamma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"e per di più, la leggerezza ha fatto irruzione anche nella mia vita- come sempre secca e disordinata, e che io mi immagino come la solleticante attesa dell'esito di una lotteria dal premio assicurato dove posso estrarre qualsiasi cosa"

[Paulo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent descriptions. Shows the regional history , linked to a major context. As a talentous poet , Ossip mixes senses and feelings at a divine way. Sevan , Ashtarak , and much more!

[Kaya Tokmakçıoğlu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vasili Grossman'ın "Taşlar Ülkesine Yolculuk"taki içgörü, gözlem ve sıcaklıktan pek eser yok kanımca Mandelştam'ın Ermenistan notlarında. Nadejda Mandelştam'ın şairin etrafında oluşturduğu aura, onyıllarca antikomünistleri etkilemeye devam etmişti; bunun etkilerini bence Ermenistan notlarında da görüyoruz Osip Mandelştam'ın. Sevan'ı Grossman'ın betimlemesiyle Mandelştam'ın betimlemesi arasında ciddi bir açı var: İlkinde Van Gölü ile Sevan'ı özdeşleştirirsiniz ve adeta oradaymış hissine bürünürsünüz; ikincisinde ise zaman-mekân ortadan kalkmış ve bir yok-yer'de dolanır olursunuz. İnsanın kötücüllüğü ve özel olarak varoluşçu bakış açısı Mandelştam'ı derinden etkilediği için Grossman'daki bütün resme bakarak parçaları görme işini gerçekleştiremiyor şair. Dolayısıyla, Puşkin'in Erzurum yolculuğuna dair kaleme aldığı ile Grossman'ın metni arasında bir akrabalık kurabiliyorken, Mandelştam'ınkisi bir parodi halinde kalıyor.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you read an essayist and author, and you realize just how lacking is your own talent. That is what happens when we read Mandelstam. I read this book, Journey to Armenia, while sitting in a cafe in Yerevan. The sights and sounds and smells he described were just the same nearly 100 years later - except of course with a twist of the modern, of the new and exciting. This book also included an essay on an analysis of Dante's "Inferno", an extraordinary analysis showing the depth of talent of that ancient poet and the extraordinary understanding of Mandelstam. Read this book.

[Arno Mosikyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ежедневно, ровно в пятом часу, озеро, изобилующее форелями, закипало, словно в него была подброшена большая щепотка соды. Это был в полном смысле слова месмерический сеанс изменения погоды, как будто медиум напускал на дотоле спокойную известковую воду сначала дурашливую зыбь, потом птичье кипение и, наконец, буйную ладожскую дурь."

[Osman Tümay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bu kitabı sevmek için şu nedenlerden biri olmalı:
1. Osip Mandelştam'a tapıyor olmak,
2. Ermeniler ve Ermenistan'la ilgili yazılan her şeye, ayrım gözetmeksizin, bağımlılık derecesinde ilgi duymak.
3. Çeviri hatalarına karşı kayıtsız kalabilmek.

Bu 'ortaya karışık' kitabı, yayınlarını ilgiyle takip ettiğim Aras'ın neden yayımladığını anlayabilmiş değilim.

[Blazz J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mendelstam leto pred prvim vzaporovzetjem "skoči" še v sovjet priključeno Armenijo, kjer pa ne išče Stalinovega Novega človeka, temveč se prepričuje, da so se post-razsvetljenski naturalisti pravzaprav spozabili - Darwin se je namreč zmotil - ni vedel, da človek izvira iz Armenije.

[Javier Martinez Staines · Rating 4 out of 5]

El último libro que publicó Mandelstam, allá por 1933, antes de ser deportado al Gulag soviético, donde falleció. Obra en prosa cargada de refinamiento poético, es resultado de su estancia de varios meses en Armenia.

[Gayane Harutyunyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very poetic description of my homeland. Mandelshtam definitely managed to create mood of the place and create the exact atmosphere of the place.

[Davide]

"L'uomo è costruito a somiglianza di un parafulmine. Di fronte a simili notizie facciamo terra, ed è solo per questo che siamo in grado di sopportarle."

[Кристоф Дерворт · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wunderbar dieser sprachliche Witz zum Ergründen dessen, was das Auge entdeckt. Ich liebe die Vielschichtigkeit des Reisemotivs in diesem Büchlein. Und die Anleitungen zum Sehen.

[AndreasRaptis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ψυχεδελεια, Σοβιέτ, εκδρομές, ναρκωτικά, τι να σου πουν εσένα όλα αυτά. (Εκπληκτική ανάλυση της μεταφραστικης Οδύσσειας, κόσμημα η έκδοση και εξαιρετικές οι υποσημειώσεις - οβερολ ευγε).

[Aaron Benarroch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it's me, maybe the author, maybe the translation. It almost doesn't talk about Armenia. It's my first Mandelstam's book and I didn't like it.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but requires a lot of context. I sort of enjoyed it more when reading as if I stumbled on a stranger's journal.

[Carlo Pittorru · Rating 1 out of 5]

Forse il libro più noioso e inconcludente mai letto in vita mia, ottimo per dormire nei mezzi di trasporto grazie alle sue dimensioni ridotte.

[Marina · Rating 2 out of 5]

L’editore Pontecorboli ci dice che questa è una traduzione dal francese, e non dall’originale russo – che già è una cosa che non capisco e non condivido, anche perché non è che il russo sia una lingua tanto particolare, voglio dire, ci sono un sacco di persone che potrebbero tradurre un libro da questa lingua. Inoltre la traduzione mi sembra anche fatta male, con delle espressioni ricalcate pari pari dal francese («e non importa che altro»)…

Detto questo, il libro non mi è piaciuto per niente. Mi aspettavo, dal titolo, un resoconto del viaggio di Mandelstam in Armenia, invece si tratta di pensieri sparsi, sull’Armenia sì, ma anche sulla pittura, sulla zoologia, sulla letteratura. Una raccolta di cui francamente non ho capito neanche il senso, e mi sento un po’ sacrilega a dirlo ma è così. Ci sono comunque immagini molto belle, come questa: «All’intorno, la vista manca di sale. Si afferrano forme e colori e tutto sembra di pane azzimo. Questa è l’Armenia.» Ma ci sono anche associazioni che non capisco, come ad esempio: «Gli artigli dello zar sono rotti e i millepiedi camminano sulla sua faccia.»

Insomma, per me è stata una delusione, pensavo a un racconto poetico sull’Armenia, mi sono invece trovata di fronte ad altro.

[Alex Robinson]

Dreamlike travel journal. OM was captivated by Armenia, railing against Darwinian thought and rediscovering his muse. Unique but perhaps mercifully short.