Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose Reviewed by Marina Kraiskaya

Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose 

Written by Osip Mandelstam

Translated from Russian by Peter France 

Reviewed by Marina Kraiskaya 

New Directions Publishing

ISBN: 9780811230971 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811230988 (ebook) 

Now one of the most widely-read and imitated Russian poets of the 20th century, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) only became influential in the late 1960’s, after the thaw of Soviet suppression of free speech. 

The best recent translation of Mandelstam’s work, Black Earth, has anthologized poems from the collections Stone (1913/1916), Tristia (1922), Poems (1928), Uncollected Poems (1930–1933) and the Voronezh Notebooks (1935–1937). Translator Peter France also selected memoirs of Mandelstam’s St. Petersburg childhood, an essay written just after the Russian Revolution, and extracts from three works of the early 1930s. 

Mandelstam, a Polish-born Jew, studied literature in Russia and Germany. Like much of the Russian intelligentsia, he spent his final days in a forced-labor camp for anti-communist sentiments. Some of his writings were only preserved thanks to his family and friends committing them to memory. Mandelstam was close friends with poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, and married to writer Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam. 

As a poet, Mandelstam turned from the popularity of symbolism toward the straightforward language of acmeism, a poetic movement that aimed to state observations and emotions directly, clearly, and through a humanist lens, utilizing cultural references, description, and far-reaching scenes. Some of Mandelstam’s poems are biting, while others are tender, sensual, and funny. The speaker of his works is unafraid of revealing secrets or the twisting of his own imagination. 

There exist many popular translations of Mandelstam in English, including The Selected Poems, published in 1973 by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, which France notes was criticized by Brodsky for replacing the Russian meters with free verse. In Black Earth, France utilizes a wide variety of rhyme schemes, remaining faithful to the described figures and imagined scenes of the original poems. France’s translations “suggest as much as possible, not only of meanings, but also of the shape, rhythms, and verbal density of the often enigmatic originals” (xv). 

Mandelstam’s poetry and prose are conscious of their ability to question or respond to the reality of the rapidly-changing 20th century world, whether in reference to the Revolution or to Russian Romantic poets of the prior generation:

……………………………No, not the moon, a brightly lit clock face

……………………………shines down on me, and how am I to blame

……………………………for seeing the milky weakness of the stars?

……………………………And I can’t stomach Batyushkov’s conceit:

……………………………“What time is it?” they asked him here on earth,

……………………………and his reply was just: “Eternity.’ 

………………………………………………………………………………………Untitled; 1912 (Black Earth pg. 9)

Modern readers will find France’s translations of Mandelstam accessible, dynamic, and flowing, often thanks to the rhyme scheme and the translator’s skill at preserving meaning and tone. Most poems are no longer than half a page. They include references to architecture, geography, myths, philosophy, artists, writers, musicians, and more. With a resonant voice and intense emotion, Mandelstam, through France, expresses subtle frustrations, musings, devotions, and doubts. Poems like [Cold chills by body] carry a muted, conscious rhyme scheme while the scene balances gracefully between a specific historical moment and breathless timelessness. 

……………………………Cold chills my body. The transparent spring

……………………………decks out Petropolis in pale green down,

……………………………but Neva’s water, like a jellyfish,

……………………………inspires a faint revulsion in my soul.

……………………………On the embankment of the northern river

……………………………dragonflies and metallic beetles hover,

……………………………the fireflies of motor cars flash by

……………………………and the gold pins of stars gleam in the sky,

……………………………but there is no star able to destroy

……………………………the heavy emerald of the moving sea.                …………………………… 1916

Often, Mandelstam makes reference to pre-revolutionary life and to what has been lost, weaving through ancient myths, modern philosophy, and imagistic description. Some bright and loud lines set the reader in early 20th-century Russia: 

……………………………I love the maneuvers of the screeching trams,

……………………………the Astrakhan caviar of the asphalt roadway

……………………………all covered with straw matting that looks like

……………………………the casing that protects a Chianti bottle,

……………………………and then the ostrich plumes that deck the carcass

……………………………of Leninist apartments as they rise. May–September 1931

Some poems have moments of compact sensory images, which was central to acmeism:

……………………………I was washing at night out in the yard—

……………………………the heavens glowing with rough stars.

……………………………A star-beam like salt upon an axe,

……………………………the water barrel brimful and cold.

The book’s title refers to an eponymous poem, alluding to the fertile, dark soil found in Russia and Ukraine. Throughout the majority of the 20th century, many political and wartime decisions were impacted by considerations of this natural resource, and it remains a nationalistic symbol. In “The World and Culture,” one of the prose excerpts of the book, Mandelstam writes:

……………………………Poetry is a plow, which turns over the earth so that the deep layers of

……………………………time, the black earth, come to the surface.

Mandelstam’s prose, speaking to literature, politics, nature, and poetry (particularly Dante), reads as relevant and enlightening, though nearly a century has passed. Similarly, his poems are far-reaching and rich, and seem like they could have been written today. 

……………………………The march of modernity, its speed, is not measured by underground trains or by skyscrapers, but by

……………………………the cheery grass poking up through the stones of the city.

What strikes me as a reader about France’s translations is his unique ability to convey Mandelstam’s strident narrative approach and pan-European intellectual passion into direct yet intimate English. 

Born in Ukraine and raised in Northern California, Marina Kraiskaya is a poet, editor, and nonfiction writer. She studied International Relations and Russian at UC Davis, and is completing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at San Diego State University.