Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon. English only.
Published 2018. Paperback, 144pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616011 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The translations were originally made from the edition Osip Mandel'shtam, Sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, Tom pervyi, Moscow, Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990, compiled by P.M. Nerler, with notes by the latter and A.D. Mikhailov. They were reworked on the basis of A.G. Mets's 2009 edition, Osip Mandel'shtam, Polnoe sobraniye sochinenii i pisem v tryokh tomakh, Tom 1 , Moscow, Progress-Pleyada. Despite numerous editors' and scholars' efforts, the authoritative text of many poems – in particular, the post-1930 poems almost entirely unpublished in Mandelstam's lifetime – remains unstable. This derives from uncertainties as to whether changes and variants resulted from deliberate artistic choices and revisions, (self-)censorship, concealment, miscopying, misdictation, the memorization process, false recollection at a much later date, and/or oral transmission, or lack of access to copies deposited with friends for safekeeping, or a combination of these, on the respective parts of both Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, his de facto secretary while he was alive and plenipotentiary literary executor – at great personal cost to herself – after his death. As an indication of this textual instability and to facilitate comparison, some variants have been included in the main text placed in square brackets, where they represent additions, or in the notes where they are alternatives. The Mets edition has also been followed with regards to the naming of poems, omitting titles by which poems have subsequently become known but which were not Mandelstam's.

The selection and its title are the translator's. Notes have been largely kept to a minimum of what seems necessary to understand discrete references, without being exhaustive as to the background to the original poems' writing. Some non-exhaustive bibliographical information can also be found in the notes.

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