Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. The Moscow Notebooks cover his years of persecution, from 1930 to 1934, when he was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture. The Notebooks include that fatal poem - with its clinching line 'His cockroach moustache laughs, perching on his top lip' - and present a shattering portrait of Moscow before the Great Terror. He attempted suicide twice, slashing his wrists in prison, and jumping from a hospital window. Exiled to Voronezh, he seemed crushed. A friend described him then as 'in a state of numbness. His eyes were glassy. His eyelids were inflamed, and this condition never went away. His eyelashes had fallen out. His arm was in a sling.' But it was to be four more years before Mandelstam was completely beaten. In Voronezh he broke a silence of 18 months, writing the 90 poems of the three Voronezh Notebooks. Nadezhda's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova's poem 'Voronezh' describes her visit there in 1936, when 'in the room of the exiled poet / fear and the Muse stand duty in turn / and the night is endless / and knows no dawn'. With an introduction by Victor Krivulin, this edition combines the two previous separate editions of The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks published by Bloodaxe.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments. A Note on the Text. List of Abbreviations. Introduction. Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder. STONE. Notes. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments. A Note on the Text. List of Abbreviations. Introduction. Mandelstam: The Poet as Builder. STONE. Notes. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture. 'Armenia brought him back to his true self, a self depending on the "inner ear" which could never play a poet false. There was everything congenial to him in this country of red and ochre landscape, ancient churches, and resonant pottery.' (Henry Gifford). Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam's incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934-35, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to the Journey.

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.

Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an outstanding figure, arguably the outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. This is a personal selection from the poetry — poems that for one reason or another I wanted to translate. I have tried to make it reasonably representative of different strands and periods in his work, with a certain stress on the brilliant and fragmentary Voronezh poems.”