Selected Poems of
Osip Mandelstam
Selected and
Translated by Christian Wiman
Copyright 2012 by
Christian Wiman
Ecco
Softbound, 81 pages, $15.99
ISBN 978-0-06-209942-6
Review by Zvi A.
Sesling
Translations of
poets, particularly Eastern European and even more particularly Russian poets
are often difficult for any number of reasons: circumstances under which the
poems were written, the difference in language and idioms and most often as we
read in English translations of poets like Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam
we are reading the translator’s version of what he or she thinks brings an
accurate representation to us. I have read such complaints in the past about
Rilke’s poetry and Neruda’s. Often I dismiss these complaints because I would
have no access to the poet and the poems were they not translated by
enterprising translators willing to take on such daunting tasks.
A number of years
ago I purchased The Selected Poems of
Osip Mandelstam (translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. (New York
Review of Books, 1973). These renderings I often found sparse, harsh the way I
imagined Mandelstam may have meant them. However, Brown in his introduction
makes clear that Merwin has translated Mandelstam into Merwin in the same way
Lowell and Nabokov translated Russian poets into Lowell and Nabokov.
So here I am with
Wiman’s translation, Stolen Air, Selected
Poems of Osip Mandelstam accompanied by Ilya Kaminisky’s introduction,
which by way of personal preference I find more interestingthorough. For example, Kaminsky calls Mandelstam a
lyric poet which Brown and Merwin clearly did not. Plus Kaminisky spends far
more meaningful time on Mandelstam’s Jewish background.
But all that has In
the Merwin version, for example, the poem Black
Earth begins thusly:
Manured, blackened, worked to a fine
tilth, combed
like a stallion’s mane, stroked
under wide air,
all the loosened ridges cast up in a
single choir,
the damp crumbs of my earth and my
freedom!
Wiman, however,
first changes the poem from four line stanzas thus his opening lines read as
follows:
Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a
rich tilth.
Everything air, star; everything
earth.
Like a choir acquiring one clean
sound—brief ringing
kingdom—
These
wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.
Clearly there is a difference, not only in
style but in language, Wiman making, I believe, Mandelstam not only lyric, but
more accessible to those who have either not read Mandelstam previously or have
struggled with previous translations.
In another poem Wiman brings American
sensibility of beauty to stark Russian language which, we must remember, was in
its original written in the worst of times for many Russians. Czarist Russia was not a happy play land, especially
for Jewish poets, and Stalinist Russia was certainly not an improvement, and in
fact for Mandelstam, his poetry proved to be his undoing, sent off to Siberia
he died at the age of 47.
Here is one of my
favorite versions by Wiman:
Bring me to the
brink of mountains, mystic
Dread, rapture of
fear I feel and …fail.
Still: the
swallow slicing blue is beautiful.
Stil: the
cloud-tugged bell tower’s frozen music.
There is in me a
man alive, a man alone,
Who,
heart-stopped above a deep abyss,
Can hear a
snowball grow one snowflake less,
The clock-tick
accretions of dust becoming stone.
No. I am not that
man, not that sadness
With its precise
ice, its exquisite rue.
The pain that
sings in me does not sing, and is true.
O whirlwind, O
real wind
In which the
avalanche is happening,
All my soul is
bells, which will not ring.
With Stolen Air Wiman brings a modern
sensibility, a beauty of language previous editions of Mandelstam may not have
attempted or succeeded in fulfilling. Yes,Wiman’s is a new Mandelstam, a
revision of what has come before and a pace setting for what may come
after. Highly recommended.
_________________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7
