- Person
- Osip Mandelstam
- Lived
- 1891–1938
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Russian (Soviet)
The story
By the early 1920s Osip Mandelstam was a recognised poet. His first book, Stone, had appeared in 1913, and in 1922, the year he married Nadezhda Khazina in Kiev and moved with her to Moscow, his second collection, Tristia, was published in Berlin. The new Soviet literary world, however, had little room for an independent voice from the Acmeist school, and he needed to earn a living.
For several years after that, Mandelstam almost completely stopped writing poetry. Instead he concentrated on essays, literary criticism and memoir. As his day job he translated literature into Russian, producing 19 books in six years, and later worked as a correspondent for a newspaper. The scholar Andrew Kahn notes that his translation work included contemporary socialist poetry and drama by German writers. He also wrote about the craft itself, including an essay on the poor state of Soviet translation, 'Streams of Hackwork', published in Izvestiia.
The work paid poorly. The Jewish Review of Books records that he once had to ask Maxim Gorky, the most powerful Soviet writer, for a shirt and trousers, and that Gorky gave him only the shirt. Yet in the same years he wrote some of his finest prose: the autobiographical sketches The Noise of Time and Feodosiya (both 1925), the short novel The Egyptian Stamp (1928) and the essay collection On Poetry (1928).
Mandelstam had studied in Paris and Heidelberg, and his work drew deeply on European culture. He once described Acmeism, the movement he had helped to found, as a longing for world culture, and his translations helped carry that culture to Russian readers. When he at last returned to poetry, around the time of a journey to Armenia, his voice had changed: he now wrote as an outsider who knew he was alone.
The translations of the 1920s are seldom read today, but they were part of the work that kept Mandelstam alive as a writer through a difficult decade, and they show how much literary labour went on behind his famous poems.
Why it matters
Mandelstam's translations carried works of European literature to Russian readers and sustained him through the years when he could barely write poetry.
About Osip Mandelstam
Warsaw-born Jewish poet, one of the greatest in the Russian language, whose sixteen-line epigram on Stalin led to exile and death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938.
More about Osip Mandelstam
- Osip Mandelstam's first book Stone appeared in 1913Osip Mandelstam published his first collection, Stone, in 1913, followed by Tristia in 1922, establishing him as a leading Russian poet.
- In exile, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh NotebooksDuring his 1934 to 1937 exile in Voronezh, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh Notebooks, including the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier.
- Osip Mandelstam wrote the manifesto of AcmeismOsip Mandelstam helped found the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry and wrote its manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism (1913).
- Osip Mandelstam dared to mock Stalin in a poemIn 1933 Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin and, when arrested, refused to disown it, believing a poet must never renounce his work.
- Osip Mandelstam's poems survived in his wife's memoryAfter the secret police seized Osip Mandelstam's manuscripts, his wife Nadezhda memorised his poems and later arranged for them to be published.
Sources
- Osip Mandelstam Wikipedia
- The Russian Joseph Jewish Review of Books
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