Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I've been a member of this group for awhile, but this is my first post.

Work has disrupted my reading for the past two years, and now that my schedule is finally settled I now again have the time to dedicate to my reading, and poetry is my passion.

First up, one of the books I'm reading now:




Canti by Giacomo Leopardi, trans. Jonathan Galassi

Poems by Emily Brontë

The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe

Collected Poems by Les Murray

Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition, trans. Peter Cole

Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 by Richard Howard

Collected Poems: 1954-2004 by Irving Feldman

Collected Poems: 1944-1979 by Kingsley Amis

New and Collected Poems by Richard Wilbur

Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca

Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl

Memory Into Threshold Speech: Collected Earlier Poetry (trans. Pierre Joris) & Selected Poems and Prose (trans. John Felstiner) by Paul Celan

Collected Poems by Ted Hughes

The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo

Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays of Robert Frost

The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, ed. Robert Alter

Selected Poems by Vasko Popa, trans. Charles Simic

Daybreak: New and Selected Poems by Claire Malroux, trans. Marilyn Hacker

What an amazing list. Looking forward to reading your reviews!

Jenna wrote: "What an amazing list. Looking forward to reading your reviews!"
Thank you, Jenna. I hope my reflections don't disappoint!





Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Christian Wiman


This is not a review of Stolen Air, because I haven't been able to organize my thoughts in order to write something as ostensibly coherent as a review. Maybe I will write one at some point, but for now all I can do is to try to capture, however inarticulately, my visceral reaction to this stupendous, overwhelming, ravishing poetry.

I read this book in a single day, in a single sitting, and I will now continue to re-read it for the rest of my days. The reason I bought the book was because of Osip Mandelstam. His greatness needed no introduction. But what I learned from this slim volume is that Christian Wiman is an even greater poet than what I already thought.

Because as Ilya Kaminsky explains in his indispensable introduction, these are not really translations. Often, there's hardly even a resemblance. But that, perhaps paradoxically, is the strength of this book. In his excellent afterword, Wiman himself writes that he prefers to call these poems 'versions' rather than translations. Mandelstam's work is, notoriously, all but untranslatable. The meaning, the form, the cadence, the wordplay, the sound, the music, simply cannot all be captured and adapted into a language other than Russian. What Wiman does is create brilliant English poems inspired by Mandelstam's own, and he's able to do this because he focuses primarily on the sound of the poems.

Sound, for Mandelstam, was everything. He composed by ear, by recitation (plus, it didn't risk his manuscripts being found and destroyed by the Cheka/NKVD). Wiman, by recreating the sound of Mandelstam's work in English, brilliantly captures that nebulous, indefinable, and most original of qualities: their poetic essence.

And what is that poetic essence? In Mandelstam, it is nothing less and nothing more than Life.

The book opens with this epigraph from Mandelstam's "The Morning of Acmeism" (1913): 'To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being.'

And this is (Wiman's version of) one of the last poems Mandelstam composed, dated May 4, 1937, which I quote in full:

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.

Or this from five months earlier, January 18, 1937:

Sorrowdrawl

Shut up: to be alone is to be alive,
To be alive to be a man--
Even hazied, even queasied by this madsmash 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.

Those are just two of the extraordinary poems that grace this collection. Every page seems to contain at least one outstanding sentence or breathtaking word compound. And as marvelous as they are to read, they are even more astonishing when they are recited out loud. Wiman has a miraculous, almost profligate, ear for the internal rhythms of a sentence.

This is the final stanza of Wiman's version of Tristia, arguably Mandelstam's most famous poem:

Soothsayer, truth-sayer, morning's mortal girl,
Lose your gaze again in the melting wax
That whitens and tightens like the stretched pelt of a
squirrel
And find the fates that will in time find us.
In clashes of bronze, flashes of consciousness,
Men live, called and pulled by a world of shades.
But women--all fluent spirit; piercing, pliable eye--
Wax toward one existence, and divining they die.

Recite it out loud and the music reveals itself. This book is so rich that there is something as good, or nearly as good, as this on practically every page. For me, the poems in this book are what great poetry (meaning true poetry) is: the meter, the rhythm of life itself.

All of which means that this post has been a very long, rambling, discursive way to say that I am obsessed with this book. Obsessed.