Search -
Osip Mandelstam: Poems chosen and translated by James Greene
Osip Mandelstam Poems chosen and translated by James Greene Author:Osip Mandelstam, James Greene (Translator) Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia's greatest poets, lived during the revolution and the reign of Stalin. Unlike many of his contemporaries, artists concerned primarily with the occult, Mandelstam offered a poetry of this world. This collection of his poems, spanning a period of over thirty years, reflects the dominant political climate of the t... more »imes, including the turmoil in St. Petersburg, where he lived. However, Mandelstam's poems are not just contemporary portraits of man and society. His allusions to ancient civilizations, including Greece and Rome, give his work an ancient bardic quality.
Despite a focus on the concrete, Mandelstam never loses sight of man's inner inspiration and its relationship to the world he creates. Mandelstam speaks of the poetic form as being like that of a cathedral: one is constructed of words, the other of stone, yet both convey the power of the human spirit. Mandelstam's works have been called "impersonal"; his family and friends are missing, the details of his life remain a mystery. Yet in these poems his presence is profoundly felt, for Mandelstam transforms his subjective vision into an expressive view of the realities around him.
Mandelstam's poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, because of the subtleties of the Russian language the he employs. James Greene's translations preserve the integrity of the originals and convey both the meaning and the spirit of these works.« less