What Do We Translate When We Translate Mandelstam?

• In Event: Translation as Liberation: Breaking the Barriers

Abstract

During the Cold War, English translations brought Russian Modernist poet Osip Mandelstam into the Anglo-American canon through translations that foregrounded the narrative of the poet as a victim of Stalin’s repressive regime. Drawing on translators’ statements of intent and method, translation theory, as well as debates in textual criticism about authoritative originals, this paper examines recent translations by Andrew Davis and Peter France as well as Christian Wiman’s experimental “versions” to explore the ways Mandelstam has been presented to English readers since the Cold War. My intent is to show that recent attempts to make “good English poems” from Mandelstam’s originals play freely with signifiers to fit their source-texts into a hagiography of the poet established during the Cold War, and reveal the effect of perceptions of history on translators’ choices, whether in unmotivated errors, deliberate misreadings, or “free” imitations. The theoretical implication of this study is that no translation—even one that purports to be free of a biographical reading or focus solely on the aesthetic or formal qualities of the original—is free of interpretative positions in regard to the author’s motivations and the circumstances of a literary work’s composition.

Author

• Matvei Yankelevich, World Poetry Books