Black Earth by Osip Mandelstam

Black Earth by Osip Mandelstam

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.

"It seems almost impossible to pay adequate homage to the poetic genius and personal courage of Osip Mandelstam, manifested during a time in the Soviet Union of tyrannical repression and terrorThese spirited and meticulous versions drawn from his poetry and prose, however, by the masterful translator Peter France, bring us considerably closer to achieving that goal. They attest to the extraordinary range and depth of Mandelstam’s complex artistic sensibility and intellect. Let us, simply enough, gratefully welcome them." -- Michael Palmer
"Where Mandelstam the uprooted Jew and Mandelstam the would-be Hellene meet is in the attempt to wrest culture from disruption and to make a home from chaos." -- Clare Cavanagh - "Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition"
"Marvelous and heartrending..." -- Vladimir Nabokov
"The greatest twentieth-century stylist in Russian." -- Guy Davenport
"In Black Earth, Peter France has made all the right choices.....[His] approach has yielded outstanding results, conveying Mandelstam’s density with an elegance that brings pleasure from the whole, even before the reader fully digests the parts. Much of the future-oriented poetry of Mandelstam’s contemporaries now sounds hopelessly dated; Mandelstam’s poetry, meanwhile, flourished with the passage of time." -- Sophie Pinkham - Poetry Foundation
"Black Earth brings me closer to Mandelstam the poet than to Mandelstam the mythic figure, and his “ancient language” is rendered into real contemporary poetry in English that succeeds in speaking eloquently to the inner eye and ear. This is all to the good." -- J. Kates - Arts Fuse
"In Peter France’s elegant translation, English readers can access not only Mandelstam’s formidable ideas and images but also something of his rhythm, rhyme and sound-play.... This book is a portrait of a life crushed by history. But it testifies, too, to the persistence of spirit." -- Alexander Wells - Exberliner
"With Black Earth: Selected poems and prose, Peter France, a veteran translator of French and Russian, has provided the first edition that consistently reflects the sound, sense – and resistance to sense – of Mandelstam’s poems and lyric prose." -- Benjamin Paloff - Times Literary Supplement

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born in Warsaw and grew up in a Jewish family in St. Petersburg. After a nomadic life as a translator and writer of children’s books, marriage to Nadezhda Khazina, and exile, he was arrested, sentenced to hard labor, and died in eastern Siberia, leaving behind some of the most glorious poems and essays ever written. Peter France  has published widely on French, Russian, and comparative literature, including the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. New Directions publishes his translations of the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi: Field-Russia and Child-And-Rose.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780811230971
ISBN 10	081123097X
Title	Black Earth
Author	Osip Mandelstam
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Year published	2021-07-13
Number of pages	168
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable