Translation Review

ISSN: 0737-4836 (Print) 2164-0564 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utrv20

Osip Mandelshtam. Tristia Translated by Kevin J.

Kinsella. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007. 72 pp.,
Osip Mandelstam. Modernist Archaist: Selected
Poems by Osip Mandelstam. Translated and edited
by Kevin M. F. Platt. Delray Beach: Whale and Star,
2008. 160 pp.

Jim Kates

To cite this article: Jim Kates (2010) Osip Mandelshtam. Tristia Translated by Kevin J. Kinsella.
Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007. 72 pp., Osip Mandelstam. Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems
by Osip Mandelstam. Translated and edited by Kevin M. F. Platt. Delray Beach: Whale and Star,
2008. 160 pp., Translation Review, 79:1, 82-87, DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2010.10524149

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2010.10524149

Published online: 01 Oct 2012.

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 82 TRANSLATION REVIEW 79

Stella. Did Chet Baker sing "My Funny Valentine" in a "low, gravelly
voice" (53)? Not in Tokyo in 1987 (the clip is on YouTube), the year
before he died. The copy editor had a bad preposition day and seems to
have been intimidated by the prospect of dealing with a translation from
an exotic language-how else to explain Konglish expressions such
as "urgent weather report," "novels" (read "fiction"), "Yongin Natural
Park" (Nature Park or Ecology Park), and the use of the Republic of
Korea system of romanizing Korean words instead of the standard
McCune-Reischauer system? The translation of sex-related content
is appropriately more explicit than the Korean original, except that
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"He made me kneel and eat his cum" (74) catches the eye in a way
never intended by the author. And what are readers unfamiliar with the
conventions of Korean-language literary fiction to make of"... " on p.
15 (ellipsis points within quotation marks, a Korean literary convention
for indicating a pregnant pause)? I will be the first to admit that no
translation is without its flaws, but not even the precipitous decline in
editorial standards at American publishing houses can account for the
shoddy editing on display here. Young-ha Kim deserves better than this
from his translator, his agent, his editor, and his publisher. Let's hope for
a better effort with Empire ofLight, Kim's next novel, due out in 20 I O.
- Bruce Fulton

Osip Mandelshtam. Tristia. Translated by Kevin J. Kinsella. Los

Angeles: Green Integer, 2007. 72 pp.

Osip Mandelstam. Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Man-

de/starn. Translated and edited by Kevin M. F. Platt. Delray Beach:
Whale and Star, 2008. 160 pp.

Osip Mandelstam isone ofthose poets that Western readers and translators
keep returning to and worrying like a dog-bone. (The reviewer will
spell the poet's name henceforth using the English, and not the German
phonetic transliteration from the Cyrillic.) The circumstances of his
emblematic life and death in Revolutionary and Soviet Russia, and their
chronicling by his widow in the single most brilliant book of biography
since Boswell's Life of Johnson, have kept his poetry continually
 Spring 2010 83

interesting to foreigners. In his native Russia, Mandelstam's verse has

been the subject of mystical exegesis and classical reverence, yet not out
of proportion with the work of Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and
Anna Akhmatova-whose lives were all interwoven with one another's
and with his. But in the West he exerts the same magnetic attraction for
translators that Neruda and Rilke do-poets who sometimes appear to
be over-translated at the expense of their compeers.
He was variously translated in the 1970s and 1980s, after the
authoritative Struve edition of his poems had been published in their
original language. Authoritative it was, but not definitive, as Clarence
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Brown wrote in its introduction: "One of the difficulties of writing

about Osip Mandelstam is that our knowledge of his life and works is
presently in a state of turbulent growth. What is said of him today is in
danger of being obsolete tomorrow or the day after that" (xxvi). A new
generation of post-Soviet scholarship has settled the dust somewhat, but
not entombed the poet. Now Mandelstam is drawing attention again in a
new wave oftranslations ofwidely diverging intent and effect, including
a chapbook of translations by various hands from Ugly Duckling Presse
and a necessary appearance in the late Paul Schmidt's New York Review
of Books collection The Stray Dog Cabaret. Of the two books under
review here, one offers a single collection of poems, unclothed even
in decency. The other comes as close to being a scholarly tome as an
introductory book for the layman can while still remaining user friendly.
Without any notes, biography or critical apparatus, Kevin J. Kinsella
has translated Mandelstam's 1922 collection, Tristia. Kinsella seems as
ignorant of the context of these poems as the blankness of reference
indicates, and his translations often actively obscure the intentions and
effects of the text. For example, in two poems in the collection lines
are-in traditional Russian fashion--deliberately omitted, thus:

- EYAeT B KaMMeHHOH Tpeseue

3HaMeHHTall 6e;::J,a,
Llapcxoa JIeCTHHu.bl cryneaa
Jloxpacneior OT crsrna,

H ;::J,JIlI MaTepH BJIlO6JIeHHOH

COJIHu.e 1.JepHOe B30HAeT. (Struve 82)
 84 TRANSLATION REVIEW 79

Kinsella gives these as:

- In stony Troezen
A great tragedy will occur:
The royal staircase
Will flush with shame
And because of a lusting mother,
A black sun will rise. (9)

By eliminating any notation ofthe gap, the translator distorts the poems.
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Sometimes Kinsella just gets things wrong. How he manages to

tum the adjective "Soviet" into "January" (44) is a mystery that remains
unexplained. He fails to translate at all the last stanza of one poem
("For happiness...," 63) and misses a line (B CYXOH pexe nycroti yeJ1HOK
nJ1bIBeT) in another (67). I am assuming that "Britain" on page II is only
a misspelling of "Briton," among numerous other typographical errors.
Perhaps not his responsibility, but the publisher's, on the very back
cover-the only place the reader has information about Mandelstam-
two book titles are written inaccurately. The overall effect is one of
carelessness, and it signifies from the beginning a work that the reader
cannot trust.
Kinsella's translations themselves are restrained, making little
effort to convey the formality of Mandelstam's Russian, yet frequently
persuasive in their conveyance of an Acmeist immediacy of speech-
listen to the sound of "stony Troezen" above. But they contain a graver
problem. By chance or unacknowledged reference, an uncomfortably
large number of lines duplicate exactly those in Bruce McClelland's
1987 translation of Tristia and David McDuff's 1975 translation of the
Selected Poems. In at least one case, Kinsella misreads McClelland's
reading of Mandelstam in such a way as to cast doubt on coincidence.
The original Russian line, Ilpospa-rasr rpl1Bbl raoyua HOYHOro--
literally "transparent manes of a [horse] herd at night"-McClelland
ambiguously rendered as "A herd of night mares with transparent manes"
(91). Kinsella turns the herd of horses into bad dreams by appropriating
McClelland's line but deleting the space between "night" and "mares"
(67). This may originally have been a clever pun on McClelland's part,
but Russian words for "nightmare" have nothing to do with horses, and
the stanza in which the line occurs speaks of ghostly absences, not of
 Spring 2010 85

terror. Kinsella has pushed the translation further out of reach of the
original. Elsewhere, a reference in Russian to the Greeks furnishing the
Trojan Horse (Axeacxne My)J(11 80 ThMe cnapaacaior KOHH), which is
misread by McClelland as "Achaian men equip their steeds in darkness"
(93), is similarly misunderstood by Kinsella as "Achaian men outfit their
horses in the dark" (69).
In the final stanza of Kinsella's translation of a poem he calls "The
Tortoise," but which is untitled (105) in the Struve edition:

The oaks are watered from a cold, earthen pot.

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The bareheaded grass rustles.

The honeysuckles smell sweet to the wasps.
Oh, where are you sacred islands,
Where no one eats broken bread,
Where there is only honey, wine, and milk,
Where grinding labor does not cloud the sky,
And the wheel turns easily? (37)

I have supplied italics, but the words so set off are identical (except for
minor differences of punctuation) to David McDuff's 1975 translation
(55-57) of the same poem. In about sixty pages of verse, there are
more than two dozen lines that I have identified as duplicating other
translators'versions.
Kevin M. F. Platt begins Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems
of Osip Mandelstam with a nineteen-page introduction to the poet, a
bibliography (which includes McDuff's translations cited above, but not
McClelland's), and a two-page explanation of Platt's editing. Four pages
of notes (including an oddly meticulous word-for-word repetition of one
when the same name crops up again) bring up the rear. He has chosen to
embed in the book a few well-known, previously published translations
by Bernard Meares, and thirty-two by Clarence Brown and W. S.
Merwin. These are clearly marked and attributed to their authors. He
also uses newer translations by Eugene Ostashevsky, others by himself
alone, and still others in collaboration with Bob Perelman and Charles
Bernstein. These provide an overview of the poet's entire career, from
Mande Istarn's first publications in 1908 until his death thirty years later.
Platt takes advantage of post-Soviet scholarship, which continues to alter
and amend earlier texts. Clearly, Platt admires the earlier translations
 86 TRANSLATION REVIEW 79

enough that the new ones have been chosen or crafted to blend in as
naturally as possible. The book is not spectacular, but it is trustworthy.
Eugene Ostashevsky's versions are the most individual. Here is his
rendering of the same last stanza of Struve 105:

Oaks drink the chilly waters of a well

Amid the noise of simple-haired grass
And fragrant lungwort gladdens wasps.
o where, where are you, blessed isles,
Where no one breaks the loaf in two and bites,
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Where there are only milk, honey and wine,

Where creaky labor doesn't darken heaven
And easily the wheel turns? (65)

This radiates its own energy, with only one clunky line (the fifth),
which also happens to be the line that strays farthest from the original
Russian. Ostashevsky mars his work with a tendency to invert the
normal subject-verb order of English more often than necessary in an
old-fashioned use of poetic license, giving a nineteenth-century flavor
to decidedly twentieth-century originals. For instance, these three
consecutive lines (in which the rhyme of herds/word is accidental, not
formal):

Transparent glow the manes of night herds.

In a dry river floats an empty skiff.
Among grasshoppers swoons the mindless word. (70)

The Yoda-like tic distinguishes Ostashevsky from the other contributors.

Although Platt himself claims to be "often slightly deforming the
English in order to 'trace over' the Russian" in his own versions (32),
this is hardly detectable, as are any distinctive contributions of his
named collaborators. The very last poem in his selection, for instance
("K nycroii 3eMJ1e HeBOJ1bHO npanana," 149) names a collaborator
(Charles Bernstein) for the first stanza and none for the second, but the
only discernible difference in style between the two is the length of the
lines. In the original, the two stanzas are equal; in the translation, lines
of the first stanza are bitten short. In general, the translators throughout
adopt a flat, clear reading of the poems, emphasizing their content rather
than their intensity.
 Spring 2010 87

Modernist Archaist provides a textbook selection of one of the most

compelling poets of the last century, covering the same ground as Brown
and Merwin's Selected Poems of 1973, but with the augmentation of
fresh readings. For the non-Russian reader, it can serve as a primer to
Mandelstam's work. If the poet's directions and images still come across
as hermetic to the English-speaking reader, be assured that the same
mystery adheres to the originals. Some critics have attributed this to
Mandelstam's Jewish background-Lev Gumilev notoriously said that
"Osip Mandelstam writes in Russian, but he thinks in a very ancient
language"-but it is far more idiosyncratic than that, "so singular, so my
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own" (38). By titling Modernist Archaist as he does, and in many of his

choices, Platt demonstrates a sensitivity to Mandelstam's exploration of
time and times that any reader can appreciate.
-Jim Kates

Works Cited
Mandelstarn, Osip, Collected Works in Three Volumes. 2nd ed. Ed. G. P. Struve and B. A.
Filipoff. Washington: Inter-Language, 1967.
-. Selected Poems. Trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. London: Oxford UP,
1973.
-. Selected Poems. Trans. David McDuff. New York: Farrar, 1975.
-. Tristia. Trans. Bruce McClelland. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1987.
The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book ofRussian Poems. Trans. Paul Schmidt. New York:
New York Review of Books, 2006.

Horace. The Odes ofHorace. Translated by Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. 208 pp.

The ancient Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65 BCE-

8 BCE) made a great claim for himself in the final poem of his first
three books of Odes, published in 23 BCE (book 3, poem 30, hereafter
abbreviated as 3.30, etc.). He professed to have built, through his
poetic skill and intellectual excellence, a "monument more lasting than
bronze," which neither rain nor wind nor the "countless series of years
and flight of epochs" would destroy. Horace even went so far as to use
the word princeps-the term Augustus coined for himself when he
became emperor-to describe his poetic feat: he would be remembered