Black Earth
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€18.50
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.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born in Warsaw and grew up in a Jewish family in St. Petersburg. After a nomadic life as a translator and writer of children’s books, marriage to Nadezhda Khazina, and exile, he was arrested, sentenced to hard labor, and died in eastern Siberia, leaving behind some of the most glorious poems and essays ever written. Peter France has published widely on French, Russian, and comparative literature, including the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. New Directions publishes his translations of the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi: Field-Russia and Child-And-Rose.