Selected Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: Mandelshtam (1891-1938[?]) was a creative genius who suffered for his art - enduring official denounciation and harassment, arrest, exile, rearrest and death in a Stalinist labour camp. This volume offers a wide body of his work, from 1908 and poems published in his first book, Stone, to poems written in notebooks during his exile in Voronezh shortly before his rearrest in 1938. These poems were not published during his lifetime, and until they were discovered is was assumed that he had not written anything once exiled. The translations do a good job of conveying Mandlestam's power and the way that he was able to focus his creative and intellectual energies. They are outwardly simple enough, yet compell the reader to look them over again and again, to search for deeper meanings and hidden messages. Mandlestam's widow remarks in the forward that " the translations of Mr.Greene are the best I ever saw." This in itself is a good enough reason to make this volume your choice for getting to know one of the greatest poets of the 20th centuary.