Josef Stalin’s skin was notoriously thin. Even the softest, subtlest forms of derision threatened to invoke his wrath, but to mock him outright was to court death itself. One could never figure when the hammer would drop – Stalin’s unpredictability was legendary – but in Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s case, just over five years passed between the composition of his infamous “Stalin Epigram” and his death in 1938.
Bad enough was the way the poem painted such an unflattering picture of the dictator. Much worse was its undeniable honesty: Stalin was brutish and coarse, kept the exclusive company of goose-necked sycophants, and delighted, ghoulishly, in killing off his enemies. It was merely Mandelstam’s gift to arrange those facts in a brief yet brilliant series of rhyming quatrains. Did he suffer greatly for them? Certainly. And though martyrdom is sometimes touted for making saints of its subjects, there’s simply no salvaging this poet’s premature death. The worst part? His name remains a byword for political repression rather than poetic excellence or democratic humanism.
Yet if recent developments are any indication – Peter France’s book of translations, Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose, comes to mind – then a much-merited paradigm shift may already be well under way. The latest effort is a throwback: Robert Tracy’s 1981 translation of Stone (1913), now being reissued in paperback for the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation series from Princeton University Press.
Written between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, Stone is the book that made Mandelstam Mandelstam. The book was also, in the perennial spirit of toweringly ambitious first shots, infinitely more than just a poetry debut. A tacit declaration of aesthetic principles, Stone was, in the words of Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda, “a book of his youthful days, a time of wonderment at the world, of first endeavors to make sense of it … and discover a firm core of life and culture.” Of course, most of the poems collected in Tracy’s bilingual edition never appeared in the initial pamphlet Mandelstam published under the same title. Three or four progressively enlarged editions followed. This one is based on the final version of 1928, and nearly a hundred years on its eighty-one poems remain the acme of modernity. The present edition pairs the poetry with an informative, insightful introduction. Tracy’s notes at the back of the book plumb the poems’ publication histories, identify textual alterations, and trace references with a zeal for completeness that is entertaining in its own right. “Poe became popular in Russia after about 1900,” one note reads.
One of Poe’s translators, Vladimir Pyast (1886–1940), was subject to nervous seizures that left him unable to speak; Mandelstam was present on one such occasion, when Pyast was reading his translations in public but broke down and stared silently at the audience until everyone left the hall.
Stone’s poems are the main event, but the whole package seems specially designed to allow a new generation of readers, on a sliding scale of commitment to the scholarly side of things, to enjoy Mandelstam for what he was first: a young poet of promise whose sensibility inclined toward tangibility – the solidity of Roman columns, the stones of St. Petersburg – and away from what he took to be the tenuous abstractions of the Symbolist movement. Such sculpturally avid poems, many of which lie on the page like elegant paperweights, can’t help inviting comparison to the materials that inspired them: oak leaves, horseshoes, bronze statues, “Caesar’s perfect features,” and every genius work of architecture their author could study. In one, Mandelstam pays homage to Notre Dame.
Where a Roman judge framed laws for an alien folk A basilica stands, original, exulting, Each nerve stretched taut along the light cross-vaulting, Each muscle flexing, like Adam when he first woke.
First stanzas don’t get much more evocative. Skipping the middle two, the poem concludes:
Stronghold of Notre Dame, the more my attentive eyes
Studied your gigantic ribs and frame
Then the more often this reflection came:
From cruel weight, I too will someday make beauty rise.
If there’s one bone of contention this book is bound to toss to a certain segment of its readers, it’s the decision to match Mandelstam rhyme for rhyme. If Tracy had been any less scrupulous an inspector of the poet’s Russian, that decision would have probably been the wrong one. But with an obvious ear for the sounds of words, including thoughtful recourse to half rhymes (and occasionally the refusal to rhyme at all), Tracy has produced a sequence of poems that are as crisply, lucidly musical as they are memorable. For the most part. Some swings are simply misses, as when the need to rhyme drives a poem into a corner, or gnarls its syntax, or destroys its rhythm.
For the most part, though, the reader of Stone is in for a crowd of standouts, even a few minor masterworks, such as poem “73.” (the majority bear numbers in lieu of titles), the sheer grace of which puts it in a league with the finest poems written anywhere, anytime.
The fire tongues
My dry life away;
No more stone songs,
I sing wood today.
It is light and rough,
From one piece, no more;
Both the heart of the oak
And the fisherman’s oar.
Drive piles more firmly in,
Hammers, pound tight,
O wooden heaven
Where all things are light.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.