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. The appearance of stars in his poetry indicated, as his wife, Nadezhda, pointed out, not a movement toward the eternal but the shrinking away from the essentially human and, therefore, the coming to an end of the poetic impulse. And air (vozduhk)—or rather the lack of it, one of Mandelstam’s greatest preoccupations in the Notebooks—stood in not as an animating principle, not as some cipher for the soul, but as an earthly element. It represented the most insistent of the triad of life’s physical necessities—food, water, breath—and by extension the freedom to move in a physical world.

But for Mandelstam each thing seen or heard or smelt or tasted or felt functioned immediately as a door, as a point of departure into an underworld of passages, chambers, and hidden connections. Each bit of experience was touched, and then moved through, absorbed, and then moved beyond. The movement of Mandelstam’s poetry was toward not the celestial but the chthonic—toward a deeper and deeper exploration of the specific. He did not generalize from experience, and the words attached to that experience, but moved deeper beneath them and within them.

So the reader—and the translator—must follow along with Mandelstam, must resist the temptation of the early exit, the premature conclusion, and carry right on, in a sense beyond language, to the core of experience and the roots of words themselves.

Mandelstam was, along with Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and a host of others, part of a remarkable florescence of Russian poetry at the beginning of the Soviet era. His extraordinary talents manifested themselves and were recognized early: his first book, Kamen (Stone), was published in 1913 when he was only twenty-two. He quickly took his place among the leading poets of the day. The intimate friendship he formed with Akhmatova during this period was unshakable, lifelong.

Mandelstam’s great early success and initial sympathy with the revolutionary changes sweeping Russia were followed by a period of increasing isolation and disillusionment with the form those changes were assuming. By the mid-1920s he had been reduced to silence. Prevented from publishing his poetry and condemned to translation to make a living, he struggled both internally and externally to find his place in the new world that was coming into being around him.

Whether by some sort of personal miracle or by exposure to the rockbound, original virtue of the landscape and language, or whether because his period of wandering in the desert had come to its natural, inevitable end, a trip to Armenia in the early 1930s (which he wrote about in prose in Journey to Armenia) restored his internal compass, his sense of purpose, and his poetic voice.

From that point on a confrontation with the literary establishment, and the regime itself, was inevitable. When it came, it was, in the context of the time, spectacular. His “Poem on Stalin” of November 1933 was completely uncharacteristic in that it was overtly political. Its composition was an act of extraordinary foolhardiness—the inevitable consequences of which he seemed, somehow, to have willfully ignored. In it he directly calls Stalin a murderer, and he confirmed and compounded his crime by sharing the poem with some twenty of his acquaintances.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boot tops gleam.†

He was, of course, denounced and arrested—which should have meant his death.

Fortunately, he still had friends in high places. He was miraculously, if temporarily, spared through the influence—it is assumed—of Nikolai Bukharin. (At that point still a powerful minister in the government, Bukharin would himself be sentenced to death in Stalin’s 1936 show trials.) Instead Mandelstam was sent into internal exile, and Nadezhda was allowed to go with him. The story of their reunion; their trip by rail and river, accompanied by three guards, to their first place of exile in Cherdyn; her gradual realization of the mental illness brought on by his imprisonment and interrogation; his panicked, deluded attempt at flight or suicide by jumping out of a hospital window; his consequent miraculous restoration to sanity; their move to a slightly less onerous exile in the city of Voronezh; their life there in increasing poverty and isolation—all of this is the backdrop for and is reflected in the poetry of the Voronezh Notebooks.

It is also described in detail in the autobiographical account of that period written by Nadezhda and titled in English Hope Against Hope. Hope Against Hope and its sequel, Hope Abandoned, are remarkable books (in Russian Nadezhda means “hope”). They are the best source for a reader who wants to know more about Mandelstam’s character, his methods of composition, and the nature of the times in which he and Nadezhda lived.

The Voronezh Notebooks was written in three bursts of activity during their stay in the city: the spring and summer of 1935, the winter of 1936, and late 1936 through the spring of 1937. Mandelstam invariably composed in his head, most often while walking, and only later dictated the poems from memory to his wife.