What began as a whim for me—translating a single eight-line poem by Osip Mandelstam to show my wife something I could sense but could not find in any existing translation—turned into an obsession. And after waking many mornings at 3:30 to work (I have twin infants, you see) and immersing myself in prose by and about Mandelstam, and coming closer and closer to hearing a voice that contains such extremes of serenity and wildness that you sometimes can’t believe it’s one person—I find that I’ve now done a book of them.
I call these poems versions and not translations, hoping to skip over the abyss of argument that opens underneath that distinction. Not because the argument isn’t often valid, but because I have little to add to it. Mandelstam, especially in the early work, is a poet of high stylistic finish and formal control. Later, particularly in the Voronezh Notebooks, he attains—or is overwhelmed by—a seething, almost savage, Stravinskyan sort of music that is always testing, and teeming out of, its own angularities.
Previous translators, as they freely admit in their introductions, have not tried to reproduce this music. Nor have I, since that would be impossible. But I have wanted to make poems that sing in English with something of Mandelstam’s way of singing, poems that follow their sounds to their meanings, and that evince a formal imperative that is as strong as—indeed, is inextricable from—their emotional one. The result is that some poems—“Hard Night,” for example—hew quite closely to the originals, and others—“Casino” or “Not One Word”—veer into what I hope are faithful arrangements of existing scores. It seems wonderful and apt that the editors of The New Criterion have decided to include “To The Translator,” since it casts a cold eye on the whole enterprise!
Some things that might be helpful: the titles, aside from “Casino,” are all mine. Except for a handful of instances, Mandelstam didn’t title his poems. My translations, and the book that began to emerge, seemed to require them. The poems here are mostly early, but you can get a feel for the storm that has already started. (After initially supporting the revolution, Mandelstam, like most artists and intellectuals of the time, was destroyed by Stalin.) Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, were constantly returning to Moscow and being forced to flee again (see Hope Against Hope for a great, moving account of these years). “Night Piece” memorializes a moment of that fearful intimacy. And in “Not One Word” I take that one word “prison” to refer, not to Mandelstam’s own experience of being interrogated and tortured, which wouldn’t happen for another four years, but to the fate he could already feel was his.
I couldn’t have written any of these poems without Ilya Kaminsky, who helped me every step of the way. I’m also grateful to Helena Lorman for all kinds of intricate information about idiom, word choice, and formal details.
