Featured in the current Spring 2022 issue, Osip Mandelstam’s “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” is a nightmarish yet poignant reflection on war. Margaree Little’s new translation aims to bring out previously overlooked aspects of Mandelstam’s poetry by practicing devoted attention to his original text and to its historical and personal contexts. In her discussion of Mandelstam, Little glides between erudition and intimacy with his works. Our correspondence led to surprising discoveries like the everyday object Mandelstam despised, serious consideration of the political significance of translating Mandelstam today, and renewed appreciation for how literary insight can shape translation.
Michal Zechariah (MZ): Before translating Osip Mandelstam’s poem this spring, you published another translation of his work in American Poetry Review. How did you first encounter Mandelstam’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it? What usually guides your choice when you decide to take on a translation project?
Margaree Little (ML): About ten years ago, around the time I was in graduate school, I first encountered Mandelstam’s work in the Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin translations. I was drawn to the poems, but remember feeling that I was missing something, as though there was a screen separating me from the poems.
In 2016, I began to translate [Marina] Tsvetaeva’s work, focusing increasingly on her political poems that have largely been neglected in English-language translation. This work drew me further into that world, that moment. Then, two years later, my partner and I were visiting our friend, the poet and translator Eleanor Wilner, in Philadelphia. Eleanor has talked about the influence of Mandelstam on her own work and gave me her copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s extraordinary first memoir, Hope Against Hope. The book describes the last four years before Mandelstam’s second arrest and death, but more than that, it offers a window into the worldview that grounded his poetry and his entire life.
After reading this book, I went back to his poems and started to translate them to get closer to the original work. I found the originals so rich in music, in layers of meaning and feeling, and so varied in tone, including sharp awareness and wit.
I also began to realize the degree to which Brown and Merwin, as well as other dominant English-language translators, have altered the poems. These changes range from what could be considered more benign (clunky wording or phrasing) to distortions that fundamentally alter the poems’ meaning. I found particularly disturbing the tendency to play up Mandelstam’s death in the translations, sometimes changing the poems radically to do so. This tendency creates a romantic myth of the poet, while erasing crucial parts of his actual work. The gap between the originals and existing versions made me want to continue to translate the poems and honor them on their own terms.
I suppose these are the dual threads that run through my translation work, whether of Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam; a connection to the poems and the deep urgency within them, and a frustration with how they have previously been translated—or ignored, or distorted—in English.
MZ: The subject of “Lines on an Unknown Soldier” resonates powerfully with the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet in your translator’s note, you also emphasize the need for awareness of our retrospective reading of Mandelstam. What are your reflections on the political significance of translating Mandelstam’s poem at this time?
ML: Yes, it is astonishing how Mandelstam wrote the poem from his own time—in 1937—in ways that resonate powerfully in the present. The poem speaks acutely to the horrors of the twentieth century, including those Mandelstam did not live to see; and as you say, it speaks now to the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Certainly, Mandelstam had lived through enough terrible events to write the poem based on those alone. But the poem does seem, in many respects, to have been visionary. In Hope Abandoned, her second memoir, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls:
He did not live to see the pact with Hitler—or at least it happened after he disappeared forever—but even while he was still alive everyday events were already becoming so fantastic and implausible that people longed for the future merely to escape the present. This applied to us as much as to anyone, yet even so when M.’s verse was suddenly invaded by forebodings of a future war, we were alarmed.
She goes on to write that in the poem, he “sensed the approach not merely of one war but of a whole series of them,” pointing to the last line of the seventh section, in which the speaker asks what is to come “this time”—the coming war—“and afterwards.”
The political significance of translating Mandelstam right now seems complicated to me. On the one hand, to prioritize and hold up a Russian poet can feel like a way of reinforcing Russian hegemony (or delusions of hegemony) at a moment when we can so clearly see its terrible cost. But even before the revolution, Mandelstam was an outsider in Russia. He was Jewish and the son of a tanner, and he met Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was also Jewish, in Kyiv, where she was born. They spent the first period of their life together there, during the Civil War.
Most importantly, Mandelstam’s poetry speaks to so much that is necessary in the present, and that refutes domination: the persistence of creativity in the face of unimaginable violence; a refusal to comply. “Lines on an Unknown Soldier,” which seems to look directly into oblivion, implicitly insists upon the value of every human life.
MZ: In the sixth stanza of the poem, its sweeping perspective gives way to a consideration of the human skull. This moment struck me as both intimate and philosophical. What do you think Mandelstam was trying to express with this image?
ML: This image seems to have been crucial for Mandelstam. Nadezhda Mandelstam writes in Hope Abandoned that the poem “was a real agony to M., and he felt sure it was more than a bad dream only after the appearance in it of a paean to man, his intellect and special structure,” in other words, “the stanza in which the human skull” is praised. She even recalls Mandelstam saying to her, upon writing this stanza, “Just look how my skull is chirping away…Now we shall have a poem.”
I think this image could be read as encapsulating the crisis in the sequence. It has layers of meaning: It conjures Yorick’s skull, and the speaker contemplates what it is to exist in the face of violence and obliteration. On a broader level, it expresses the human capacities for intelligent thought and for art. As Nadezhda Mandelstam writes, “Man, as the possessor of a skull, is the true miracle, and every man is unique and irreplaceable. By virtue of living, thinking, and feeling, he is a Shakespeare.”
This is something I find remarkable in Mandelstam’s work: his love and praise for humanity, while he himself was exiled and almost completely ostracized. There is even a kind of quiet joy in this stanza: “thought foams, dreams to itself—.”
The image of the skull finds echoes elsewhere in the sequence. I’m thinking of the image of Don Quixote’s delicate “metatarsus,” which also evokes human anatomy with a kind of nobility (if here, with a touch of humor). This sense of nobility contrasts starkly with what war does to the unknown soldier, “dull, smallpoxed / and belittled.” And at the end of the poem, the skull could belong to the speaker himself, who we realize is among “the rows” of the dying, and who holds his date of birth—signifier of an individual life— in his “clamped…fist.”
MZ: It sounds like Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs provide valuable insights about her husband’s works. Can you say more about the artistic connection between Osip and Nadezhda? How does Nadezhda’s writing influence current interpretations of Osip’s poetry?
ML: Yes, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs are invaluable, both in their insights into Mandelstam’s life and work, and what it was to be alive at that moment. They are great works of literature in their own right: honest and bitingly funny. Nadezhda does not romanticize Osip or their relationship, but the books show a connection between them that was profound, and, I would also say, equal. She was intimately connected to his poems. For instance, she often wrote the poems down for him, and he followed her suggestion on the ordering of the third Voronezh Notebook.
It is because of Nadezhda that Osip Mandelstam’s work survived. After his death, she dedicated her life to preserving his poems. Some she saved by literally hiding them in baskets, occasionally leaving these with a very few trusted friends. She also memorized them. She herself survived by living in the remote provinces, and, in at least one instance, fleeing just hours before the Cheka arrived to arrest her. In the 1950s, she managed to send her husband’s work to the West via Russian émigré Gleb Struve.
I know that many translators and scholars have benefited from her writing and knowledge. She worked with Clarence Brown, as well as with Oxford scholar Jennifer Baines, whose book on Mandelstam’s later work is also an excellent resource.
At the same time, one can see ways in which translators have overlooked and dismissed Nadezhda’s insights, in what I can only assume is gendered oversight. To give an example, the Brown/Merwin collection includes a translation of poem 394, addressed to the Mandelstams’ friend, Natasha Shtempl. In his introduction, Brown praises Merwin’s choices in translation, including his insertion of a clock (which does not appear in the original) as an image to describe Shtempl’s limp.
Brown even goes so far as to commend the clock addition as “very Mandelstamian.” What he ignores—and what Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts in Hope Against Hope (for which Brown wrote the introduction!)—is that Mandelstam hated clocks. When they appear in his poems, they do so as emblems of bureaucracy and the Soviet machine, in contrast with what he thought of as living time and living art. He would never have used this image to describe a friend. Ironically, in some respects, Brown has been considered more of an expert on Mandelstam’s life than Mandelstam’s widow, who lived this life with him.
MZ: Your translator’s note mentions that Mandelstam’s poem presents unique challenges to translation. Can you say more about those challenges and how you approached them? It would also be interesting to hear how your decisions differ from those of the Mandelstam’s previous translators.
ML: Some of the challenges in translation are aspects of the poem you have commented on—the sweeping and shifting perspective, the startling images that are both precise and complex. For lack of a better word, the poem resists an easy “narrative.” It finds its shape, instead, through the movement of its music, tone, references, and imagery, and the imagery itself ranges from the grounded to the nightmarish and surreal.
The biggest challenge for me was achieving clarity in the translation without imposing a false kind of clarity onto it. This meant trusting the images, such as the lines “Ash-clarity, sycamore-vigilance / a little red rushes into their house,” without trying to add interpretive syntax. The poem unfolds on its own terms.
My priority was to stay as close to the original as possible, and not add words or phrases that could alter the poem’s meaning. I didn’t attempt to replicate the poem’s rhyme scheme, but sound was an important part of how I approached the translation. I listened to the poem and the music that emerged organically while translating, so the translation has its own sound patterns just as the original does.
Other translators have made a number of different choices. To focus on a few that have received critical attention, in his translation of the Voronezh Notebooks (NYRB, 2016), Andrew Davis includes a version of the poem written in language one presumes is supposed to sound contemporary. For instance, he translates the sixth line of the fifth section, “And the guy makes friends with the gimp—.” These kinds of linguistic choices have a diminutive effect on the poem, and they are insulting; the word Mandelstam uses in the original, which translates directly as “cripple,” doesn’t have this mocking valence.
For some reason, the poem has been omitted entirely from other popular selected editions, such as those by Brown and Merwin (NYRB, 1973), Christian Wiman and Ilya Kaminsky (Ecco, 2012) and the recent version by Peter France (New Directions, 2021). This is a notable omission of Mandelstam’s actual engagement with his time.
MZ: You also write poetry, nonfiction, and criticism. How do you see translation as part of your overall creative activity?
ML: I began to translate Tsvetaeva around the same time that I began writing my manuscript in progress, a collection of poems about trauma, erasure, and memory. At first, I didn’t know how to receive the lyric intensity of her work, its directness; in the United States, I think we’re often trained toward irony and deflection. Ultimately, though, the unapologetic assertion and clear lyric voice in her poems gave me a kind of permission in my own. And despite the terrible circumstances of their lives and deaths, her work and Mandelstam’s work speak clearly to survival.
Translating these poets has also led me to write more criticism, as I felt the necessity of addressing the problems in previous translations and thinking about the connections between these poets’ work and our own political moment. Encountering their poems, then, has become part of a larger process of thinking about issues in translation and in language, and what it means to honor another writer’s work rather than exotifying and appropriating it.
Translation also helps me to look beyond the limited scope of American poetry, including its defaults and trends. This is one reason that the work of Asymptote is so important: encountering other linguistic traditions is a corrective to myopia, offering a larger perspective of what poetry, and literature, can be.
Margaree Little’s translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva appear in Asymptote, American Poetry Review, and InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail). She is the author of Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), recipient of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her poems and criticism have appeared in journals including the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, New England Review, and The Southern Review. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundations Residency Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship, among other awards. With Jaquira Díaz, she co-edited Resistance, Change, Survival, a six-month special feature in the Kenyon Review Online on issues of art, resistance, and the current political climate. She lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona.
Michal Zechariah is an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote and scholar of early modern English literature. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Psyche, and 3:AM Magazine, as well as various Hebrew literary journals. She teaches at the University of Chicago.
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