Selected Poems
Drawn from Stone and Tristia, the first two collections that established Mandelstam as the finest Acmeist poet, his Classicism precise and jeweled where his contemporaries were either symbolist or bombastic. He was arrested, exiled, re-arrested, and died in a transit camp in 1938 after writing a poem that mocked Stalin's pockmarked face. The Stalin Epigram, memorized and passed hand-to-hand, is the bravest act in 20th-century literature. His widow Nadezhda memorized everything to keep it alive.
Mandelstam's poems live in Russian sound, the one thing translation cannot carry; English gets the images and the biography while the music stays home. Versions differ so wildly that you are partly choosing a translator's Mandelstam, and the classical allusions demand notes for nearly everything. The heroic life story does a lot of work the English texts cannot.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
