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Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St.
Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of
Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his
friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing
life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to
be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious
personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume
collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction
and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet
whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to
none.
Osip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of
Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of
acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his “Stalin
Epigram” in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the
pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to
Mandelstam’s consistent independence of mind and concern for the
freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however,
they also bear the marks of Mandelstam’s attempts to somehow
reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the
poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence
Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition
includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts
and in the memory of Mandelstam’s wife and executor, Nadezhda.
Alistair Noon’s translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a
Railway Station: Selected Poems, appeared from Shearsman Books in
2018, with two further volumes, in 2022 – the current volume and
Occasional and Joke Poems. His own poetry has appeared in two
collections, Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015),
both from Nine Arches Press, and a dozen chapbooks from various
presses. He lives in Berlin. Praise for Concert at a Railway
Station “To my mind this is the best Mandelstam ‘selected’
yet and belongs on the bookshelves of everyone with an interest in
20th-Century Russian verse.” —Ross Cogan, Poetry Wales
“Alistair Noon’s translations of Mandelstam are an important
contribution to the study and appreciation of this vital writer.”
—Anton Romanenko, B O D Y “Noon daringly replicates
Mandelstam’s formal stanzas, using slant rhymes with a zingy
freshness of diction that stops the poems from ever sounding like
trans-lationese.” —Henry King, Glasgow Review of Books The
cover design is based on that for the Soviet Museum Bulletin
published in 1930 by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and
designed by artist Boris Ender. Ender also designed the cover for
Mandelstam’s children’s book, Two Trams, in 1925.
An extensive sampling of the whole of Mandelstam's career from his
first collection up to the late poems that were memorised by his
wife, when it was too dangerous to have them written down. One of
the great poets of the first half of the 20th century, Mandelstam
is one of the figures who needs to be translated and re-translated,
being too important to be taken for granted.
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