{"id":11336,"date":"2013-12-27T12:27:40","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T16:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11336"},"modified":"2013-12-27T12:27:40","modified_gmt":"2013-12-27T16:27:40","slug":"75-years-ago-osip-mandelstam-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/75-years-ago-osip-mandelstam-died\/","title":{"rendered":"75 Years Ago Osip Mandelstam died"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe data-src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/82778687\" height=\"360\" width=\"480\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"about:blank\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam<span style=\"font-size: 12px;\">\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/span>\u041e\u0301\u0441\u0438\u043f \u042d\u043c\u0438\u0301\u043b\u044c\u0435\u0432\u0438\u0447 \u041c\u0430\u043d\u0434\u0435\u043b\u044c\u0448\u0442\u0430\u0301\u043c \u2014 was born\u00a0January 15 <span style=\"font-size: 12px;\">\u00a0<\/span>1891 &amp; died 75 years ago today on December 27, 1938 in Siberia at a transit camp to the Gulag where Stalin had sent him for writing poems that insulted the dictator.\u00a0Probably the greatest Russian lyric poet &amp; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Noise-Time-Selected-European\/dp\/0810119285\/ref=pd_sim_b_1\">essayist<\/a> of the first part of the 20C. I am still awaiting a really great translation into English of the poetry. Many have tried, with variable results: there are several decent versions, but also a number that sound flat or dated (but Mandelstam is a tough tough poet to translate), &amp; a few good ones indeed (I can&#8217;t wait for the day when John High&#8217;s complete versions will finally come out.) Meanwhile you can read a gathering of Mandelstam&#8217;s poems in various new translations online as an Ugly Duckling e-booklet <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uglyducklingpresse.org\/archive\/online-reading\/new-translations-by-osip-mandelstam\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The video above, recorded a few years ago by Nicole Peyrafitte,\u00a0has Charles Bernstein &amp; me reading extracts from Paul Celan&#8217;s radio play on Osip Mandelstam. The text is extracted from my translation of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sup.org\/book.cgi?id=1236\">Paul Celan: The Meridian: Final Version \u2014 Drafts \u2014 Materials<\/a> published by Stanford University Press;\u00a0the sections of the play\u00a0<span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">\u00a0below\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">I<\/span><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">\u00a0posted a few years back\u00a0on this blog, &amp; reproduce today to honor &amp; celebrate this great poet:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<p>Toward the end of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sup.org\/book.cgi?id=1236\"><em>Meridia<\/em>n Variorum edition<\/a> the editors reprint a radio play Paul Celan wrote the same year he composed the acceptance speech for the B\u00fcchner prize. It is made up of two alternating voices telling an abbreviated version of Mandelstam\u2019s life and a number of Mandelstam poems in Celan\u2019s German translation. I have no Russian &amp; have retranslated these poems directly from Celan\u2019s German versions, without referring to any extent English translations from the Russian (unless some of the Englished versions I read over the years still ghost my memory, a possibility I cannot exclude). Here, a few extracts: first, the speakers discussing Mandelstam\u2019s poetics, and then, one \u2014 rather well-known \u2014 poem:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. Speaker:\u00a0These poems are the poems of someone who is perceptive and attentive, someone turned toward what becomes visible, someone addressing and questioning; these poems are a conversation. In the space of this conversation the addressed constitutes itself, becomes present, gathers itself around the I that addresses and names it.But the addressed, through naming, as it were, becomes a you, brings its otherness and strangeness into this present. Yet even in the here and now of the poem, even in this immediacy and nearness it lets its distance have its say too, it guards what is most its own: its time. 2. Speaker:\u00a0It is this tension of the times, between its own and the foreign, which lends that pained-mute vibrato to a Mandelstam poem by which we recognize it.(This vibrato is everywhere: in the interval between the words and the stanza, in the \u201ecourtyards\u201d where rhymes and assonances stand, in the punctuation.All this has semantic relevance.) Things come together, yet even in this togetherness the question of their Wherefrom and Whereto resounds \u2013 a question that \u201cremains open,\u201d that \u201cdoes not come to any conclusion,\u201d and points to the open and cathexable, into the empty and the free. 1. Speaker:\u00a0This question is realized not only in the \u201cthematics\u201d of the poems; it also \u2013 and that\u2019s why it becomes a \u201ctheme\u201d \u2013 takes on shape in the language: the word \u2013 the name! \u2013 shows a preference for noun-forms, the adjective becomes rare, the \u201cinfinitives,\u201d the nominal forms of the verb dominate: the poem remains open to time, time can join in, time participates. \u2026..<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify; padding-left: 30px;\">\u00a02. Speaker:\u00a0A poem from the year 1915:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Insomnia. Homer. Sails, taut.<br \/>\nI read the catalog of ships, did not get far:<br \/>\nThe flight of cranes, the young brood\u2019s trail<br \/>\nhigh above Hellas, once, before time and time again.<\/p>\n<p>Like that crane wedge, driven into the most foreign \u2013<br \/>\nThe heads, imperial, God\u2019s foam on top, humid \u2013<br \/>\nYou hover, you swim \u2013 whereto? If Helen wasn\u2019t there,<br \/>\nAcheans, I ask you, what would Troy be worth to you?<\/p>\n<p>Homer, the seas, both: love moves it all.<br \/>\nWho do I listen to, who do I hear? See \u2013 Homer falls silent.<br \/>\nThe sea, with black eloquence beats this shore,<br \/>\nahead I hear it roar, it found its way here.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>1. Speaker<\/strong>: In 1922, five years after the October revolution, \u201cTristia,\u201d Mandelstam\u2019s second volume of poems comes out.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The poet \u2013 the man for whom language is everything, origin and fate \u2013 is in exile with his language, \u201camong the Scythians.\u201d \u201cHe has\u201d \u2013 and the whole cycle is tuned to this, the first line of the title poem \u2013 \u201che has learned to take leave \u2013 a science\u201d.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Mandelstam, like most Russian poets \u2013 like Blok, Bryusov, Bely, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Esenin- welcomed the revolution. His socialism is a socialism with an ethico-religious stamp; it comes via Herzen, Mihkaylovsky, Kropotkin. It is not by chance that in the years before the revolution the poet was involved with the writings of the Chaadaevs, Leontievs, Rozanovs and Gershenzons. Politically he is close to the party of the Left Social Revolutionaries. For him \u2013 and this evinces a chiliastic character particular to Russian thought\u00a0 \u2013 revolution is the dawn of the other, the uprising of those below, the exaltation of the creature \u2013 an upheaval of downright cosmic proportions. It unhinges the world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>2. Speaker:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Let us praise the freedom dawning here<br \/>\nthis great, this dawn-year.<br \/>\nSubmerged, the great forest of creels<br \/>\ninto waternights, as none had been.<br \/>\nInto darkness, deaf and dense you reel,<br \/>\nyou, people, you: sun-and-tribunal.<\/p>\n<p>The yoke of fate, brothers, sing it<br \/>\nwhich he who leads the people carries in tears.<br \/>\nThe yoke of power and darkenings,<br \/>\nthe burden that throws us to the ground.<br \/>\nWho, oh time, has a heart, hears with it, understands:<br \/>\nhe hears your ship, time, that founders.<\/p>\n<p>There, battle-ready, the phalanx \u2013 there, the swallows!<br \/>\nWe linked them together, and \u2013 you see it:<br \/>\nThe sun \u2013 invisible. The elements, all<br \/>\nalive, bird-voiced, underway.<br \/>\nThe net, the dusk: dense. Nothing glimmers.<br \/>\nThe sun \u2013 invisible. The earth swims.<\/p>\n<p>Well, we\u2019ll try it: turn that rudder around!<br \/>\nIt grates, it grinds, you leftists \u2013 come on, rip it around!<br \/>\nThe earth swims. You men, take courage, once more!<br \/>\nWe plough the seas, we break up the seas.<br \/>\nAnd to think, Lethe, even when your frost pierces us:<br \/>\nTo us earth was worth ten heavens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b><a href=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/osip1.jpeg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-11348 lazyload\" alt=\"osip1\" data-src=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/osip1.jpeg\" width=\"318\" height=\"159\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/osip1.jpeg 318w, https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/osip1-300x150.jpeg 300w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 318px) 100vw, 318px\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 318px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 318\/159;\" \/><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\u041e\u0301\u0441\u0438\u043f \u042d\u043c\u0438\u0301\u043b\u044c\u0435\u0432\u0438\u0447 \u041c\u0430\u043d\u0434\u0435\u043b\u044c\u0448\u0442\u0430\u0301\u043c \u2014 was born\u00a0January 15 \u00a01891 &amp; died 75 years ago today on December 27, 1938 in Siberia at a transit camp to the Gulag where Stalin had sent him&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[908,42,43,1114,91,1074,103],"tags":[583],"class_list":["post-11336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebration","category-essays","category-european-history","category-homage","category-poetry","category-radio","category-translation","tag-osip-mandelstam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11336"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11357,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11336\/revisions\/11357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}