Stone

(Paperback)

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'There is a salubrious elan about much of the book, and the fact that it is a book, not just a selection the significant poems, amplifies our sense of what Stone really means to its contemporary readers' Seamus Heaney 'What makes Robert Tracy's book invaluable is his feeling for context...Another thing that comes across in these translations is the verve and immediacy of the poems' occasions, recalling the Acmeist programme of 'this-worldliness'- there are poems about tennis and ice-cream and silent movies, poems that seem to jump into being on impulse' Seamus Heaney, London Review of Books 'A blend of classical serenity and brash iconoclasm. This is a splendid introduction to a poet who should be known thoroughly' G.E. Murray, Chicago Sun Times 'Professor Tracy has done a superb job. His introduction is excellent, his notes are very comprehensive...and his verse translations are remarkably good. All one can say is "Thank you"' Irish Times When Stone appeared in 1913, it marked the debut of one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Precision, clarity and concreteness, a concern with form and fascination with European culture, especially architecture, were touchstones for the young poet and remained so for the rest of his extraordinary writing life. This bilingual edition, based on the most complete edition of 1928, was published, alongside The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, to mark Mandelstam's centenary in 1991.

Author Bio

Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was born of Jewish parents in January 1891 in Warsaw, but grew up in St Petersburg, where he was educated at the prestigious Tenishev school. Following his schooling, he spent three years in Western Europe, living in Paris and visiting Switzerland, Italy and Germany. By 1911 Mandelstam had returned to St Petersburg, where he began to publish poems in Apollo and to attend the weekly literary salon in Vyacheslav Ivanov's Petersburg apartment, 'The Tower'. His friendship with Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova's first husband, led him to take an active part in the 'Acmeist' movement, a reaction to the mysticism and vagueness of Symbolism which called for clarity, precision and 'thisworldness'. In the Spring of 1913 he published his first book Stone, which made an immediate impact. Mandelstam published only two other books of poems in his lifetime, Tristia (1925) and Poems (1928), and various prose works, including the semi-autobiographical sketch The Noise of Time (1925), the short novel The Egyptian Stamp (1928) and a collection of essays, On Poetry (1928). Between 1925 and 1930 he found himself increasingly at odds with the new regime and, unable to compose poetry, supported himself by writing children's books, translating and occasional journalism. Then, in 1934, quite deliberately Mandelstam read a satirical poem about Stalin to a small group of friends. Within days he was arrested and exiled first to Cherdyn and later to Voronezh, where he filled three school exercise books in a last creative burst of poetry. He returned to Moscow in 1937 and was rearrested in 1938, at the height of the purges. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in the winter of that year. The full story of his later life is told by Nadezhda Mandelstam in her two-volume memoir Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned; his non-fiction prose is published in English in a one-volume edition, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Robert Tracy is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkely.