Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose
Osip Mandelstam
(Author)
Peter France
(Translator)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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 of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into "a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song ... something like a goldfinch tremolo."Peter France--who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam's work for decades--draws 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 selection of Mandelstam's prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante's Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
July 06, 2021
Pages
168
Dimensions
5.3 X 8.02 X 0.48 inches | 0.41 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811230971
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet born in St Petersburg. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth centuries most important poets. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam and one of the foremost members of the poetic school of Acmeism. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife. He died in 1938 of typhoid fever in a transit camp.
After leaving school, Peter France wanted to become a builder and took on an apprenticeship, unfortunately though, the firm went broke, and he was out on the street. He applied for a job with a firm selling clothing, hosiery and furnishings and spent some two years with them. Then he was called up with the army, did a cadre course with the Special Air Service and became a member of B-Troop, eventually serving with them in Vietnam. He was about to re-enlist and rang his parents in Tasmania, only to be bluntly told that the farm may not be there when he got out, so he told his father that he would purchase the farm as if it was Joe Blow off the street; thus, with his military career ended, he became a dairy farmer and is still on the farm today.
Reviews
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 terror. These 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
Marvelous and heartrending...--Vladimir Nabokov
The greatest twentieth-century stylist in Russian.--Guy Davenport
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"
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"
Marvelous and heartrending...--Vladimir Nabokov
The greatest twentieth-century stylist in Russian.--Guy Davenport
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"
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"
