Poems by Osip Mandelstam

Translated by Robert Lowell

Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 and spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg. A victim of Stalinist repression, he died in 1938 in transit to a remote Siberian concentration camp. Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of this century, a member of the gifted generation which included Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak.

In his youth Mandelstam was linked with the Acmeists, a group of poets dedicated to freeing Russian verse from the strictures of Victorian rhetoric. Working at approximately the same time as the Imagists in England and America, the Acmeists endeavored, in Mandelstam’s words, to reinstate “the power of the word itself” because “each word is a psyche, a live soul freely choosing its own sweet body. ‘ Mandelstam s early verse is neoclassic, hermetic, and yet of crystalline clarity. Unlike Pasternak’s power, which is in the sweep of the whole poem, Mandelstam’s incantatory magic is felt at the level of the word.

From the late twenties on, Mandelstam was a foe of Stalinism. Of all the writers in those years it was perhaps he, a hypersensitive, delicate man, who resisted Stalinist intimidation most courageously. Each year lile was made increasingly unbearable for him and his wife. They lived in Moscow, then were exiled for a time in the provincial town of Voronezh. Progressively, Mandelstam’s verse lost its luminosity; it remained elliptic but took on somber overtones. With the exception of the first poem in this selection (which already contains intimations of disaster), dated 1916, the verse presented here belongs to Mandelstam’s later period.

Some of these poems were recited to me last year by a poet of what is known as the “younger war generation" in the U.S.S.R., a man of forty. This was on a warm afternoon at Eastertime during a visit to the Novodevetchy monastery on the outskirts of Moscow. The intensity with which the poet recited Mandelstam’s lines as we strolled amid the crowd filling the flamboyant monastery, all cupolas and arabesques, stressed for me the deep involvement of this poetry with Russian experience.

A selection of Mandelstam’s work has been prepared for publication in Moscow, the first since the early thirties. But his poetry is already an important part of Russian literature; today’s young Soviet poets often know Mandelstam’s poems by heart, and many worship his memory.

Mr. Lowell’s adaptations are based on close prose translations which I worked out for him. Mr. Lowell has departed from the meter used by Mandelstam. He has made free with the syntax and recreated some of the imagery; the result is new poems, astonishingly true to the tone and content of the original ones.

— OLGA ANDREYEV CARLISLE