PT 304 USSR seminar; LT 329 The Writing Life; LitFest at Bard College Berlin Presents

The Vision of Thin-Bodied Wasps: Osip Mandelstam’s Poetry in English Translation

This event begins at 7:30pm CET (Berlin time).

An innovator in poetics and an anti-Stalinist in politics, Mandelstam was a crucial literary figure through the 20th century and remains so in the 21st, both within and beyond the former Soviet Union. Translator and poet Alistair Noon reads from his three published volumes of translations of Mandelstam’s poetry, discussing the Russian poet’s life, work and context.
Born in Warsaw in 1891, Osip Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg. Part of the Acmeist grouping in Russian poetry’s Silver Age, his poetry incorporated influences as diverse as Dante, Futurism and natural science. Increasingly in conflict with the Soviet literary and political establishment, he faced publishing difficulties from the mid-1920s onwards, and was internally exiled to Voronezh in 1934 following a poem insulting Stalin. Rearrested in 1938, he died in a Gulag transit camp in the Soviet Far East later that year.

Translator and poet Alistair Noon reads from his three published volumes of translations of Mandelstam’s poetry, discussing the Russian poet’s life, work and context.
Osip Mandelstam - The Voronezh Workbooks, translated by Alistair Noon, Shearsman Books https://www.shearsman.com/store/Osip-Mandelstam-The-Voronezh-Workbooks-p436965321
Osip Mandelstam - Occasional and Joke Poems, translated by Alistair Noon, Shearsman Books https://www.shearsman.com/store/Osip-Mandelstam-Occasional-and-Joke-Poems-p436964250
Two Verse Essays, Longbarrow Press
https://longbarrowpress.com/current-publications/alistair-noon/

Alistair Noon’s translations of Mandelstam have been published as Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems (2018), The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems (both 2022; all Shearsman Books). His own poetry has appeared in two collections and a dozen chapbooks, most recently Two Verse Essays (Longbarrow Press, 2022). He lives in Berlin.

The event is open to the BCB community. Registration is not required. 
 

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Download: Osip Mandelstam poems and biographical note.pdf

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Lecture Hall, P98a

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