Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1933 in Conversation about Dante: Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to…
Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem in 1933 that begins approximately like this: Do not tempt alien tongues – rather try to forget them:No matter what, you won’t be able to bite glass with your teeth. It’s not an invective against…
To add to my recent note on Anselm Kiefer’s new Khlebnikov-inspired exhibition and to my earlier posts on the poet (Jakobson reading K.; Bobeobi 0, 1, and 2), two excerpts from Notes on Poetry by Osip Mandelshtam (1923): Modern Russian…
Say “the noise of time” to a Russianist or a literary-aware Russian, and the instant response will be: Mandelstam. This reaction is hardly universal. As Nikil Saval writes: Julian Barnes’s new novel, “The Noise of Time,” is about Shostakovich… The novel’s title…
Two years ago or earlier I made a point to translate into English what I consider one of the most meaningful Russian poems of the 20th century, Osip E. Mandelstam’s Lamarck. It’s still work in progress but it’s time to…