Osip Mandel'shtam Ordine dei libri (cronologico)

First published by Collins and Harvill Press in 1971.

Осип Мандельштам (1891–1938) — одна из ключевых фигур русской культуры XX века, ее совершенно особый и самобытный поэтический голос. «В ремесле словесном я ценю только дикое мясо, только сумасшедший нарост», — так определял Мандельштам особенность своей прозы с ее афористичной, лаконичной, плотной языковой тканью.

Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) is one of the key figures of 20th-century Russian culture, with a unique and distinctive poetic voice. "In the craft of words, I value only wild meat, only mad growth," Mandelstam defined the peculiarity of his autobiographical prose, where he consciously breaks the classical narrative form, as the external events of individual destinies are pushed to the background. Mandelstam's prose, with its aphoristic, concise, and dense linguistic fabric, is primarily the "noise of time," not a chronicle, but an oratorio of the epoch.

Osip Mandelstam is a central figure not only in modern Russian but in world poetry, the author of some of the most haunting and memorable poems of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak, a touchstone for later masters such as Paul Celan and Robert Lowell, Mandelstam was a crucial instigator of the "revolution of the word" that took place in St. Petersburg, only to be crushed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mandelstam's last poems, written in the interval between his exile to the provinces by Stalin and his death in the Gulag, are an extraordinary testament to the endurance of art in the presence of terror. This book represents a collaboration between the scholar Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, one of contemporary America's finest poets and translators. It also includes Mandelstam's "Conversation on Dante," an uncategorizable work of genius containing the poet's deepest reflections on the nature of the poetic process.