The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam, Translated by Andrew Davis
Translated from the Russian by Andrew Davis
Osip Mandelstam is one of the great twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work.
Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full of the sights and sounds of the steppes, blue sky and black earth, the roads, winter breath, spring with its birds and flowers and bees, the notebooks are a continual improvisation and an unapologetic affirmation of poetry as life.
About the translator Andrew Davis
Paperback book
NYRB Poets, 2016