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15 reviews for:
Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam
Ilya Kaminsky, Christian Wiman, Osip Mandelstam
4.21 AVERAGE
15 reviews for:
Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam
Ilya Kaminsky, Christian Wiman, Osip Mandelstam
4.21 AVERAGE
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.
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.
Sorrowdrawl was my favorite in this Russian poet's collection.
This translation sings.
Some of my favorite excerpts:
"Frogs, all ooze and noise, bellvowel
Their bodies into a single aural oil." (Faith)
"Better to live alluvial" (Steppes)
"I might have learned to hear
In any random rotting log
A tree release its rings year by slow year." (Steppes)
"Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not." (Sorrowdrawl)
Some of my favorite excerpts:
"Frogs, all ooze and noise, bellvowel
Their bodies into a single aural oil." (Faith)
"Better to live alluvial" (Steppes)
"I might have learned to hear
In any random rotting log
A tree release its rings year by slow year." (Steppes)
"Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not." (Sorrowdrawl)
very hard to describe succinctly or maybe even not succinctly. weird broken music of the spheres that is also medicine, is the best i can do. i should read other translations, since wiman's is by his own accounting impressionistic.
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:
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 messHis work is spectacular.
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.
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.
dark
hopeful
slow-paced
I am completely unqualified to rate, but felt like I had to read it given current events. I knew that Mandelstam lived in Kiev during the Russian Civil War and for a time in Crimea as well. The last poem in this collection:
Through Kiev, through the streets of the monster,
some wife's trying to find her husband.
One time we knew that wife,
the wax cheeks, the dry eyes.
Gypsies won't tell fortunes for beauties.
Here the concert hall has forgotten the instruments.
Dead horses along the main street.
The morgue smells in the nice part of town.
The Red army trundled its wounded
out of town on the last streetcar,
one blood-stained overcoat calling,
"Don't worry. We'll be back!"
Through Kiev, through the streets of the monster,
some wife's trying to find her husband.
One time we knew that wife,
the wax cheeks, the dry eyes.
Gypsies won't tell fortunes for beauties.
Here the concert hall has forgotten the instruments.
Dead horses along the main street.
The morgue smells in the nice part of town.
The Red army trundled its wounded
out of town on the last streetcar,
one blood-stained overcoat calling,
"Don't worry. We'll be back!"
challenging
reflective
medium-paced