Offers the complete body of work of one of the twentieth century's greatest Russian poets for the first time in English.

Russia’s foremost modernist master in a major new translation Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into “a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song … something like a goldfinch tremolo.” Peter France—who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam’s work for decades—draws heavily from Mandelstam’s later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet’s tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant “Stalin poem.” A selection of Mandelstam’s prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante’s Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.

James Greene's acclaimed translations of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, now in an extensively revised and augmented edition.

A selection of poems by Osip Mandelstam translated into English and with a postscript by Ilya Bernstein. Most of the poems are from the 1930s, mostly from the "Voronezh Notebooks" (1935-1937). The collection includes several longer poems: The Slate Ode, The Octaves Cycle, The Verses on the Unknown Soldier, and The Ode to Stalin.The translations were guided by the belief that the most important thing about a poem is neither its meaning nor its sound, but whatever it is in it that makes its readers memorize it. Accordingly, an attempt has been made here to capture that particular aspect of the originals, with the hope of making English-language versions of Mandelstam's poems that at the very least point to that which invites memorization in his work, and which in the best cases may be memory-worthy in their own right.

A new selection and translation of the work of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the most important Russian poet of the twentieth century Political nonconformist Osip Mandelstam's opposition to Stalin's totalitarian government made him a target of the communist state. The public recitation of his 1933 poem known in English as "The Stalin Epigram" led to his arrest, exile, and eventual imprisonment in a Siberian transit camp, where he died, presumably in 1938. Mandelstam's work—much of it written under extreme duress—is an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the face of oppression and terror. Stolen Air spans Mandelstam's entire poetic career, from his early highly formal poems in which he reacted against Russian Symbolism to the poems of anguish and defiant abundance written in exile, when Mandelstam became a truly great poet. Aside from the famous early poems, which have a sharp new vitality in Wiman's versions, Stolen Air includes large selections from The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks. Going beyond previous translators who did not try to reproduce Mandelstam's music, Christian Wiman has captured in English—for the first time—something of Mandelstam's enticing, turbulent, and utterly heartbreaking sounds.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Modernist Archaist offers a comprehensive English-language selection of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, edited by Russian scholar Kevin M. F. Platt, who also contributes an illuminating essay. New translations by notable contemporary poets combined with an exceptional selection of previous translations are representative of the most up-to-date interpretation of Mandelstam’s work. Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), one of the most significant poets of twentieth-century Russian literature, also embodied more fully than any other its profound paradoxes. He was a Jew born in Poland who became a leading Russian poet. He was a committed Modernist who was nevertheless faithful to the great examples and strict forms of the past literary tradition. Most strikingly, he was a rebel and radical thinker who was ultimately hounded to death as an “enemy” of the revolutionary Soviet society. Yet while Mandelstam’s poetry bore witness to the convulsions of twentieth-century Russian culture and politics, it was by no means limited or defined by these historical contexts. In an early statement of his creative credo Mandelstam wrote: “for an artist, a worldview is a tool or a means, like a hammer in the hands of a mason, and the only reality is the work of art itself.” The poems offered in this volume, about half of them appearing in previously unpublished translations, present an overview of Mandelstam’s major works. Introductory materials include an essay on his life and poetry.