THE LIVING MANDELSTAM
It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Davis:
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was persecuted for his poetry and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok, Russia.1
Or the subtitle of a piece by Eimear McBride in The New Statesman in 2017:
The cat-and-mouse game between the poet Osip Mandelstam and the Soviet dictator could only end in death.2
Elsewhere writers take up Mandelstam’s biographical circumstances as a lens through which the supposed obscurity of the later poems can be understood:
The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had to say involved, if said plainly, the danger of death.3
This last quote comes from the late Clarence Brown, the former Princeton professor who has long been considered the American authority on Mandelstam. Both Brown’s 1955 book on Mandelstam (the publisher’s blurb for which begins, “Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in one of Stalin’s labor camps…”) and the collection of translations on which he collaborated with W.S. Merwin were nominated for the National Book Award. Brown is credited with bringing Mandelstam’s poems, and knowledge of his life, to the West, via Russian émigré scholar Gleb Struve. There is undoubtedly truth in this, though we must also consider Nadezhda Mandelstam’s deliberate choice to place her husband’s papers with Struve; and, much more troublingly, the role of the CIA, which funded the 1955 U.S. publication of Mandelstam’s Collected Works in Russian (edited by Struve and Boris Filippov) and presumably played an active role in financing Brown’s work as well.4
Why does all of this matter? In her commentary on translations of Lorca in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, Rebecca Seiferle writes:
We read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say that all the various translations (and few Spanish poets have been as variously translated as Lorca) and texts about Lorca himself and his work collaborate to create an understanding of his work for the English
