Volume 21, Number 1 · February 7, 1974
Beyond Consolation
By Joseph Brodsky, Translated by Barry Rubin
Hope Abandoned
by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated by Max Hayward
Atheneum, 687 pp., $13.95
Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems
translated by Clarence Brown, translated by W.S. Merwin
Atheneum, 100 pp., $6.25
Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
translated by Burton Raffel, translated by Alla Burago, with introduction and notes by Sidney Monas
State University of New York Press, 353 pp., $15.00
Osip Mandel'shtam, Selected Poems
translated by David McDuff
Rivers Press, Cambridge, England (Distributed by Duckworth & Co.), £2.25
The words of Amos could serve as the epigraph to this book: 'I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell sacrificial offerings in your solemn assemblies.' This is a book of anger, a book of despair and pain. It is also, and above all, a book of love for the man who was the best Russian poet of the twentieth century and who died in a concentration camp in 1938. Even his widow does not know the exact date of his death, and on the basis of testimony given by some who happened to survive she is able to state it only approximately. During his lifetime the poet was slighted; after his death he was reviled and silenced; and quite recently a respected Harvard professor declared him of interest 'only to émigrés,' in spite of the fact that this poet shared with his people everything that fell to their lot, including the unmarked pit where he was thrown to rot, his prison camp number tag still tied to his ankle. The poet's name is Osip Mandelstam, and the book I am speaking of is the second volume of memoirs by his widow, Nadezhda, whose name means 'hope' in English—a circumstance that was played up with dubious wit in the book's English title.
Review, 5173 words
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