A review by lokster71
Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Ilya Kaminsky, Osip Mandelstam, Christian Wiman
4.0
I was aware of who Mandelstam was and I have read a handful of his poetry before but this is a fine collection. Perhaps I am projecting a little, based on what I know of Mandelstam's life and fate, but there is a melancholy air to much of this poetry. However, also joy at creativity and poetry. It seems from this work that if ever a man lived to write poetry and was driven to do so, even at his lowest personal ebb then that man was Mandelstam.
One of the poems in this collection, 'The Stalin Epigram', probably sealed his fate. In the first instance, after he was grassed up by someone, it led to his exile, which was a surprisingly lenient fate but I expect he was not to be forgiven or forgotten and he died, on his way to yet another exile, cold and broken. We know a lot about this because his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, told their story in two books, 'Hope Against Hope' and 'Hope Abandoned'. There is a quote from that book, which Clive James hammered away at in his 'Cultural Amnesia':
"We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you."
—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned
Which I think explains Osip Mandelstam's doom better than I ever could.
There is beautiful work in here. It makes me once more wish I could read and write Russian. I fear there is something one misses when reading poetry in translation, although as - even if I did read Russian fluently - I'd be doing my own translation and without the poetic touch perhaps someone else's expert translation is the best I can hope for.
I'll leave you with a few lines from Poem 378 (p127 of this old, old edition) as a sample and recommend you read them yourself:
"Better to cleave my heart
into blue shards, ringing,
then when I die, keeping faith
to the last with the lovers,
every sky in my breast will echo,
ringing out, and up."
One of the poems in this collection, 'The Stalin Epigram', probably sealed his fate. In the first instance, after he was grassed up by someone, it led to his exile, which was a surprisingly lenient fate but I expect he was not to be forgiven or forgotten and he died, on his way to yet another exile, cold and broken. We know a lot about this because his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, told their story in two books, 'Hope Against Hope' and 'Hope Abandoned'. There is a quote from that book, which Clive James hammered away at in his 'Cultural Amnesia':
"We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you."
—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned
Which I think explains Osip Mandelstam's doom better than I ever could.
There is beautiful work in here. It makes me once more wish I could read and write Russian. I fear there is something one misses when reading poetry in translation, although as - even if I did read Russian fluently - I'd be doing my own translation and without the poetic touch perhaps someone else's expert translation is the best I can hope for.
I'll leave you with a few lines from Poem 378 (p127 of this old, old edition) as a sample and recommend you read them yourself:
"Better to cleave my heart
into blue shards, ringing,
then when I die, keeping faith
to the last with the lovers,
every sky in my breast will echo,
ringing out, and up."