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Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam by Ilya Kaminsky, Osip Mandelstam, Christian Wiman
savaging's review against another edition
5.0
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.
wshier's review against another edition
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!"
lauren_endnotes's review against another edition
5.0
STOLEN AIR: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman with contributions and Introduction by Ilya Kaminsky, 2012 by Ecco.
You're one person when you pick up a book, and when you finish, you're quite another. That's definitely how this one struck me.
Initial thoughts when I picked up this slim volume of modernist Russian poetry: past-time, a toe-in-the-water, a let's see why I keep seeing his name mentioned.
Post-reading thoughts: is this what perfection looks like? Did I just read my favorite poetry collection ever?
I've read this collection THREE times since Friday. Twice aloud to myself because the poems *sing* in a way I haven't quite encountered. Wiman's translation is sublime.
The Introduction essay by (NBA-shortlisted) poet Ilya Kaminsky propelled me right into more research on Mandelstam, and his unique poetic style. #Kaminsky notes Mandelstam's birthplace in Poland and his family's migration to Russia, learning Russian as his second language. He muses if this is why Mandelstam's use of language is different, more playful with onomatopoeia and lilting phrases and meter.
In 1934, Mandelstam wrote a short poem and recited it to some friends at a gathering. One of these friends informed on him and his subversive words about Joseph Stalin. Mandelstam was arrested and imprisoned for this act. And it wasn't the last time either. Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, were both arrested again, and sent to the gulag, where Mandelstam later died in 1938. Nadezhda survived and went on to write several books / memoirs about her and Osip's lives. Right after reading this, I ordered a copy of her book, Hope Agaist Hope, and some of Osip's translated essays.
You're one person when you pick up a book, and when you finish, you're quite another. That's definitely how this one struck me.
Initial thoughts when I picked up this slim volume of modernist Russian poetry: past-time, a toe-in-the-water, a let's see why I keep seeing his name mentioned.
Post-reading thoughts: is this what perfection looks like? Did I just read my favorite poetry collection ever?
I've read this collection THREE times since Friday. Twice aloud to myself because the poems *sing* in a way I haven't quite encountered. Wiman's translation is sublime.
The Introduction essay by (NBA-shortlisted) poet Ilya Kaminsky propelled me right into more research on Mandelstam, and his unique poetic style. #Kaminsky notes Mandelstam's birthplace in Poland and his family's migration to Russia, learning Russian as his second language. He muses if this is why Mandelstam's use of language is different, more playful with onomatopoeia and lilting phrases and meter.
In 1934, Mandelstam wrote a short poem and recited it to some friends at a gathering. One of these friends informed on him and his subversive words about Joseph Stalin. Mandelstam was arrested and imprisoned for this act. And it wasn't the last time either. Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, were both arrested again, and sent to the gulag, where Mandelstam later died in 1938. Nadezhda survived and went on to write several books / memoirs about her and Osip's lives. Right after reading this, I ordered a copy of her book, Hope Agaist Hope, and some of Osip's translated essays.
serenaac's review against another edition
5.0
Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman is a selection of poems from Mandelstam’s entire career translated from his non-native Russian into English. The introduction is rather long, but with good reason as it strives to capture a poet that was always evolving and striving to breath new life into the Russian language and to provide a voice to those seen as outsiders of the government. Living through WWI and a Russian revolution, Mandelstam — a Poland born Jew who moved to Russia with his parents — became an exile and later died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938 after being arrested.
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/05/stolen-air-by-osip-mandelstam-translated-by-christian-wiman.html
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/05/stolen-air-by-osip-mandelstam-translated-by-christian-wiman.html