Voronezh Notebooks

OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891–1938) was born and raised in St. Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School, before studying at the universities of St. Petersburg and Heidelberg and at the Sorbonne. Mandelstam first published his poems in Apollyon, an avant-garde magazine, in 1910, then banded together with Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev to form the Acmeist movement, which advocated an aesthetic of exact description and chiseled form, as suggested by the title of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone (1913). During the Russian Revolution, he left Leningrad for the Crimea and Georgia, and settled in Moscow in 1922,where his second collection of poems, Tristia, appeared. Unpopular with the Soviet authorities, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to publish his poetry, though an edition of collected poems did come out in 1928. In 1934, after reading a poem denouncing Stalin to friends, Mandelstam was arrested and sent into exile. He produced many new poems during these years, and his wife, Nadezhda, memorized his work in case his notebooks were destroyed or lost. (Her extraordinary memoirs of life with her husband, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, published in the 1970s, later helped to bring Mandelstam a worldwide audience.) In 1937, Mandelstam’s exile ended and he returned to Moscow, but he was arrested again almost immediately. This time he was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. He was last seen in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

ANDREW DAVIS is a poet, cabinetmaker, and visual artist. His current project is the long poem IMPLUVIUM. He divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the north coast of Spain.

Osip Mandelstam

Voronezh Notebooks

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW DAVIS

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

a Amparín y Censi, que me dieron de comer—A.D.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
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Translation and introduction copyright © 2016 by Andrew Davis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938, author.

[Voronezhskie tetradi. English]

The Voronezh notebooks / by Osip Mandelstam ; translated and with an introduction by Andrew Davis.

1 online resource. — (New York Review Books poets

ISBN 978-1-59017-911-6 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-59017-910-9 (alk. paper)

I. Davis, Andrew, translator, writer of introduction. II. Title.

PG3476.M355
891.71'3—dc23

2015024854

Cover design by Emily Singer

ISBN 978-1-59017-911-6
v1.0

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Contents

Biographical Notes

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

VORONEZH NOTEBOOKS

First Notebook

Second Notebook

Third Notebook

Index of First Lines

Introduction

W. H. AUDEN once complained to Joseph Brodsky: “I don’t see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet. The translations that I’ve seen don’t convince me at all”*—a comment that indicates the conflict between Osip Mandelstam’s reputation as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and his equally notorious impermeability to translation, if not to comprehension itself.

Why is Mandelstam so hard to get at? There is, of course, the density of his language and imagery and the prominent role of rhyme and rhythm in his work. He was one of the great “orchestrators” of language, one of the great masters of sound and cadence, which has posed enormous—some would say insuperable—obstacles to translation. Related is the tantalizing, and perennial, question of the differences between Russian and English poetic practice, a question whose scope and complexity is beyond my capacity to deal with here. But underlying everything, I think, is the unique, the radical demand that Mandelstam places on his readers.

All of Mandelstam’s poetry is excavated from the midden of his experience. This is its fundamental, invariable, characteristic, and essential principle. There was little of the theoretician and nothing of the mystic in him; he was the most earthly of men. One can see this clearly in the highly unusual way he treats three common poetic images, both in the Voronezh Notebooks and in his earlier poetry, images through which he expressed his horror at being separated from life. Not just by death—though death was a real threat when he was composing the Notebooks—but by anything that prevented him from immersing himself in physical, palpable existence. For Mandelstam, the sky (nebo) most often suggested not some paradise or heaven but sexless, inhuman, asphyxiating emptiness.