The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (New York Review Books Classics)

I like Merwin's Mandelstam more than that of five other translators with whom I've compared Mandelstam translations. It often takes three readings of a Mandelstam poem to get why it was written---not what it is about, please---but WHY it was written. That is what you look for. After that the sense of the poem will appear. Well, Robert Lowell's imitations of Mandelstam are impressive, especially of the Stalin poem. However, in THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ROBERT LOWELL, there are only a dozen or so Mandelstam poems while the Brown/Merwin book has 97 pages of poems, along with a long forward. If you have any sense you will leap from this book to Nadezhda Mandelstam's HOPE AGAINST HOPE and HOPE ABANDONED---the story of her husband Osip's murder by Stalin. These two books have an inner light beyond praise and are two of the last century's greatest prose works---and they are marvelously translated by Max Hayward (who elsewhere has been battered for his early first English translation of ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH; nonetheless his Nadezhda Mandelstam works could not be bettered). A warning: once you get into twentieth-century Russian poetry and especially Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova you will find yourself drunk with agonies. These poets lived through societal horrors under Stalin that you can't grasp without reading Nadezhda Mandelstam. We have nothing in English like twentieth century Russian poetry. By the way, you will want the New York Review of Books Classics paperback edition of OSIP MANDELSTAM: SELECTED POEMS (by Merwin/Brown expanded). Well, while I'm at it let me say THE COMPLETE POETRY OF OSIP EMILIEVICH MANDELSTAM in English by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago from State University of New York Press (353 pages) has literal translations---perhaps closest of anyone's to Mandelstam's Russian originals---and yet the least poetic versions. But I should tell you as well that when Mandelstam himself translated Petrarch's sonnets, the Russian reader couldn't find any Petrarch after the first lines, the poems had been so Mandelstamized in Russian. So Mandelstam would have nothing against Merwin's Merwinized English versions (or Lowell's imitations). Here are a few lines of Merwin for you to compare with the Raffel/Burago literal verses. This poem is called "The Last Supper" and is about Da Vinci's great fresco:The heaven of the supper fell in love with the wall.It filled it with cracks. It fills them with light.It fell into the wall. It shines out therein the form of 13 heads. (Merwin/Browm)Supper-sky adoring the wall--wounded, scar-bright sky--falling into her, flaring,turned into 13 heads. (Raffel/Burago)This is just the first stanza of the poem. I am happy indeed to have the COMPLETE MANDELSTAM from Raffel/Burago but I find the literal short lines too crowded; like fruitcake, enough's enough---although as I say these sharp-cut lines may be closer to the original. And the WHY of why did Mandelstam write this poem may come through more strongly in these brilliant little facets rather than in the longer lyrical line of Merwin/Brown. Take your choice!--although it's grand to have both. And let me end on one last note: Nadezha Mandelstam, who admireed Solzynitsin's IVAN DENISOVICH thought the death camp described in this work (drawn from Solzynitsin's imprisonment in the middle forties) is a day at the beach beside the camp Mandelstam was sent to in the late thirties.

These translations of Mandelstam's poems are not so much Mandelstam as they are W.S. Merwin channelling Mandelstam. I prefer Clarence Brown's translations in his critical study of 1972,  Mandelstam . The problem with Brown's book is that it doesn't include any of Mandelstam's poems written in the 1930s. This book, on which Brown and Merwin collaborated, does, and for that reason it is valuable. It is valuable for another very good reason. It includes Mandelstam's very interesting long critical essay on "The Divine Comedy," "Conversation About Dante," translated by Clarence Brown and Robert Hughs. This essay struck me as being important, not because of what it says about Dante whom I have not read, but because it seems to me to offer insight into understanding Mandelstam's own poetry or at least his method. Here are a few suggestive quotations: Poetic speech is a crossbred process, and it consists of two sonorities. The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second sonority is the speech proper . . . . (103) Understood thus, poetry is not a part of nature . . . . Still less is it a reflection of nature, . . . but it is something that . . . settles down in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating nature as acting it out by means of its instruments, which are commonly called images. (103) In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. (104) External explanatory imagery is incompatible with the practice of instruments. (104)I hope these few quotes give you some idea of what Mandelstam was doing or trying to do when he created poems and will inspire you to want to read more of what he had to say in this essay. I will leave you with one last tidbit, which Mandelstam applied to Dante, but which I will apply to Mandelstam: "The labor of reading [Mandelstam] is above all endless, and the more we succeed at it the farther we are from our goal." (107)

Having read with much frustration the translations by Andrew Davis (NYRB, 2016), Bernard Meares (Persea, 2000), and the present work by Brown and Merwin, I chanced upon a book entitled The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane and found it significantly more intelligible. Mandelstam is said to be difficult to understand even in Russian; so translating him must be a nightmare. I find the McKanes to be more successful with the poems from the Notebooks.

Merwin's translations are more flowing, clear and casual, James Greene's more formal, stilted, opulent, rich - depends on mood and poem. I think a serious Mandelstam fan needs both. In one poem they directly contradict each other in meaning. Many times i made my own favourite version out of the two and my limited Russian. If i had to have one, Greene because usually his grandeur and elegance work with Mandelstam like cut crystal for beauty and clarity, but sometimes Mandelstam's simplicity and clarity is needed. But sometimes his voice is too workaday, and whatever OM's faults, he's never workaday

Some brilliant poems (#223; #344;#351;#388 to name a few), but overall I couldn't connect with the poet's voice on any deep level. Perhaps the dense classical allusions, which forced me to rack my brain for my long ago Classical Culture studies, stopped me from being drawn into this volume.

As a newcomer to Mandelstam this was a wonderful discovery. Poems taut with all the turmoil of the historical backdrop they were written against, in translations that feel (as a non-Russian speaker I can only go by intangibles) like a winning balance. The work shines. The essay on Dante is dazzling (no other word for it). Highly, wholeheartedly recommended.

Bought for a friend - she was very happy.

Personal culture and enjoyment.