Black earth : selected poems and prose / Osip Mandelstam ; translated from the Russian by Peter France.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mandelʹshtam, Osip, 1891-1938, author.

Contributor:

France, Peter, 1935- translator.

Language:

English

Russian

Subjects (All):

Mandelʹshtam, Osip, 1891-1938--Translations into English.

Mandelʹshtam, Osip.

Mandelʹshtam, Osip, 1891-1938.

Mandelʹshtam, Osip, 1891-1938.

Genre:

Literature.

Translations.

Physical Description:

xvi, 148 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New Directions Publishing, [2021]

Summary:

"Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times he lived through during the Stalinist era. It was while exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, that his poetry, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, transformed into "a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves...becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its sharp unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo." The eminent Scottish translator Peter France has been translating Mandelstam's work for decades, but only now has offered it to readers like a divine gift in Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose. France has drawn heavily from Mandelstam's later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet's tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant "Stalin poem." A shimmering section of Mandelstam's prose-memoirs of his Petersburg childhood, extracts on his Jewish inheritance, sunlit Hellenism, Dante's Tuscany, the centrality of poetry in society-irradiate the poetry with warmth and insight"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: POEMS

From Stone (1913/1916)

"The cautious muffled sound"

"No need to speak of anything"

Silentium

"Keen hearing stretches out a sail"

"Out of the evil, sticky deep"

"Stretching tight the silken threads"

"No, not the moon"

"I hate the steady gleam"

Notre-Dame

Petersburg Stanzas

The Admiralty

Tennis

Akhmatova

"Orioles in the woods"

"I have not heard the tales of Ossian"

"Sleeplessness. Homer. Sails stretched tight"

"I shall not see the celebrated Pbedre"

From Tristia (1922)

"

How the splendor of these veils"

"Cold chills my body"

"We'll die in crystalline Petropolis"

"In a deep sleigh, with straw spread for a litter"

"Doubting the wonder of the resurrection"

"The thread of golden honey flowed from the jar"

"Let's honor freedom's twilight, brothers"

Tristia

"High on Pieria's rocky ridges"

"We shall all meet again in Petersburg"

"Heaviness, tenderness"

"When Psyche-life, following Persephone"

"I have forgotten the word I wanted to say"

"Take from my palms some sun to bring you joy"

"Among the round of shades treading the tender meadow"

"Because I hadn't the strength to hold on to your hands"

From Poems (192.8)

"I was washing at night out in the yard"

The Age

One Who Finds a Horseshoe (a Pindaric fragment)

Slate Pencil Ode

January 1, 1924

"I shall fling myself through the dark streets' Gypsy encampment"

Uncollected Poems (1930-1933)

Leningrad

"With imperial power I was only connected Through childhood"

"Help me, O Lord, to live through this long night"

"We'll sit in the kitchen, you and I"

"For the noisy valor of future years"

"I drink to the asters of wartime"

"Preserve my speech forever"

"Not yet a patriarch"

"Shove the papers in the drawer"

"Oh, how we love to fake and cheat"

Batyushkov

Ariosto

"Cold spring. Fearful Crimea with no grain"

"Mozart in bird noise, Schubert on the water"

"The apartment

quiet as paper"

"We live without touching the homeland beneath us"

From the Voronezh Notebooks (1935

1937)

"I have to live, though twice now I have died"

Black Earth

"What's the name of this street?"

"After long-fingered Paganini"

"We are still full of life"

"Yes, lying in the earth, my lips are moving"

"On this river, the Kama"

"Robbing me of the seas, a springboard and a sky"

Stanzas

"Can you praise a woman who's dead?"

"A wave runs on"

"From past the houses and the trees"

"My goldfinch, I'll toss back my head"

"The pine grove's law speaks in one voice"

"The idol sits unmoved within the mountain"

"Through my cabin windowpane"

"Day is a kind of greenhorn now"

"I'll marvel at the world, the snows"

"Yeast of the world"

"You've not died yet"

"Alone, I look into the frost's face"

"What can we do with the deadness of the plains"

"Oh, this slow spaciousness, so short of breath"

"How womanly silver will still burn"

"Now I am in a spider's web of light"

"I hear the January ice"

"Like Rembrandt, martyr of the chiaroscuro"

"Armed with the eyesight of thin-waisted wasps"

"I sing when my throat is moist and my soul is dry"

"Rendings of rounded bays"

"I shall say it in draft, in a whisper"

"Do not compare: what lives is incomparable"

"Oh, how I wish"

"The potters exalt the blue island"

"I lift this green to my lips"

"There are women akin to the damp earth"

PROSE

From The Noise of the Times

The Word and Culture

From Fourth Prose

From Journey to Armenia

From Conversation about Dante.

Notes:

"A New Directions Paperback original."

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780811230971

081123097X

OCLC:

1201297777