Dimensions
135 x 210 x 9mm
"To exist is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no paradise other than being." - Osip Mandelstam
A central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, Osip Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in early 20th century St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik revolution. His body of work, his later poems in particular, written on the run in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag Archipelago, provide an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the presence of state terror.
Mandelstam, especially in the early work, was a poet of high stylistic finish and formal control. Later, particularly in the Voronezh Notebooks, he attained a seething, almost savage, Stravinskyan sort of music that is always testing, and teeming out of, its own angularities. Previous translators, as they freely admit in their introductions, have not tried to reproduce this music. With Christian Wiman's new translations, he has captured in English - for the first time - poems that sing with something of Mandelstam's way of singing, poems that follow their sounds to their meanings, and that evince a formal imperative that is as strong as-indeed, is inextricable from-their emotional one.
