Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam was perhaps the most important Russian poet of the nineteen-hundreds—a  crucial instigator of the “revolution of the word” that took place in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg and a political non-conformist who earned the enmity of Stalin and his totalitarian regime. With Stolen Air, Christian Wiman, editor of POETRY, America’s oldest and most prestigious magazine of verse, offers a new selection and translation of Mandelstam’s poetry—from his hard-edged and highly formal early poems to his almost savagely musical later works—for a new generation to be moved by, marvel at, and appreciate.
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A new selection and translation of the work of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the most important Russian poet of the twentieth century

Political nonconformist Osip Mandelstam's opposition to Stalin's totalitarian government made him a target of the communist state. The public recitation of his 1933 poem known in English as "The Stalin Epigram" led to his arrest, exile, and eventual imprisonment in a Siberian transit camp, where he died, presumably in 1938. Mandelstam's work—much of it written under extreme duress—is an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of art in the face of oppression and terror.

Stolen Air spans Mandelstam's entire poetic career, from his early highly formal poems in which he reacted against Russian Symbolism to the poems of anguish and defiant abundance written in exile, when Mandelstam became a truly great poet. Aside from the famous early poems, which have a sharp new vitality in Wiman's versions, Stolen Air includes large selections from The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks.

Going beyond previous translators who did not try to reproduce Mandelstam's music, Christian Wiman has captured in English—for the first time—something of Mandelstam's enticing, turbulent, and utterly heartbreaking sounds.

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“A book so urgent that the poems feel carved into the skin.” - Michael Lista, National Post, on Every Riven Thing

“Every poem seems made to steady and fortify him against mortality.” - Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“One of the preeminent devotional poets of any faith now writing in English.” - David J. Rothman, First Things

“An ecstatic ruckus worthy of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who also tasted the tears in things—and the holy too.” - Dana Stevens, New York Times

“The best thing to say about Wiman is not that he reminds you of previous poets: it’s that he makes you forget them.” - Clive James, Financial Times

“One of the best books of poetry written in the past 20 years. It is extraordinary.” - Lubbock Avalanche-Journal on Every Riven Thing