Relative Genitive: Poems with translations from Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky - Softcover

Vinokur, Val; Mandelstam, Osip; Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0999073710 ISBN 13: 9780999073711

Publisher: Poets and Traitors Inc., 2018

Synopsis

Original poetry by Val Vinokur, accompanied by a selection of poems by Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Vinokur. Edited by Emily Skillings, "Relative Genitive" is the second book from Poets & Traitors Press, which publishes hybrid books of poetry by a single author-translator.

About this title

From the Author

"...This book is like Akhmatova's couch. I thought that if both Mayakovsky and Mandelstam could sleep on the same piece of furniture, then my poems could hold the space between my translations of both poets--so radically different in temperament, style, and outlook. Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how her husband became friends with Mayakovsky in Petersburg, but the two separated due to the fact that "it was 'not done' for poets of rival schools to associate with each other." Mayakovsky was a flamboyant Russian extrovert who served the Soviet regime with poster work and poetry until he could no longer muffle his more lyrical energies. Mandelstam was a refined Jewish introvert who poetically defied the regime and was killed by it. ... The Acmeist Mandelstam is in many ways a neo-classicist, whereas Mayakovsky is a Futurist, asking in one of his poems: "What's the point rebuilding Notre Dame?" But in Mandelstam's poem about that cathedral, it emerges that Notre Dame was never really finished in the first place. "The past has not even been born yet," he declares in "Word and Culture" (1921). And where Mayakovsky is inspired by the dregs, human and otherwise, of the modern urban streetscape, Mandelstam finds the same when he looks to the late-medieval, Parisian poet-outlaw François Villon. My own work cements all this, provisionally, with the undrying mortar of the high and low: scriptures and television, spirits and dead letters, abject sentiment and exalted wreckage. My poetry moves between introversion and energy, doubt and bravado, and between this world that is supposedly "for everyone" and the obscure ruins of a poetic history--all in an attempt to rescue what can be rescued in both. Everything is relative and related, genitive and generative..."

About the Author

OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) was one of the great Acmeist poets of Petersburg. His first two books drew on the classical tradition of European civilization and on its architecture as a metaphor and guide for poetic practice. Settling in Moscow in 1922, Mandelstam shifted away from poetry toward memoir (The Noise of Time) and experimental fiction, before returning to poetry in 1930. In 1934, he was arrested and sentenced to exile in the Russian provinces for reciting a blistering epigram attacking Stalin to a group of friends. Mandelstam was arrested again in 1938 for "anti-Soviet activities" and sentenced to hard labor. He died months later in a transit camp in Vladivostok.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930) was a brash poet, playwright, artist, and actor, who became a leading Russian Futurist. Having made his mark with such long poems as "The Backbone Flute" and "Cloud in Pants," he lent his talents to the Bolshevik Revolution, even as he began to chafe against the constraints of Soviet orthodoxy after completing two satirical plays (The Bedbug and The Bathhouse) lampooning government bureaucracy. In 1935, five years after Mayakovsky took his own life in Moscow, Stalin praised his work, leading to his rehabilitation and canonization as the "Poet of the Revolution."

VAL VINOKUR (1972-) was born in Moscow and immigrated to Miami Beach as a child. He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, and has published poetry, translations, and prose in The Boston Review, New American Writing, McSweeney's, and The Massachusetts Review. His co-translations with Rose Réjouis were recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of Isaac Babel's Essential Fictions was published in 2017.

About this edition

• Publisher: Poets and Traitors Inc.
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0999073710
• ISBN 13: 9780999073711
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104