new book of Osip Mandelstam translations for free download

[Ilya Bernstein]

To SEELANGS readers:

I'd like to let readers of the list know that I've uploaded my collection of translations of Mandelstam poems here:

http://books.google.com/books/about?id=hYigAgAAQBAJ

The book can be freely downloaded as a pdf. Please feel free to download, print, use with students, etc.

Of the poems, seven are from the 1920s, 17 from the Moscow Notebooks (1930-1934), and 29 from the Voronezh notebooks (1935-1937). A sample translation appears below.

Ilya Bernstein

***

Sample translation:

I am lost in the sky – what to do?
He to whom it is near, reply!
It was easier to ring for you,
Dante’s discuses nine.

Not I can be sundered from life.
Its dream is: to kill, then to kiss.
And my ears, my eyes, my eyeholes
Overflow with Florentine grief.

Then lay not upon my temples
Laurels that kiss and cut
But tear my heart into pieces
Of that blue ringing sound...

And when I sleep, after serving,
In life to the living a friend,
It will echo deeper and higher –
The reply of the sky in my breast.

9 - 19 March 1937

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