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In a discussion concerning the distinction between Book and Notebook, Nadezhda Mandelstam makes this comment about the collection which goes under the name of Tristia. Turns out that it was not assembled by Mandelstam.
" In his younger days M had used the word "book" in the sense of "phase." In 1919 he thought he would be the author of one book only, but then he realized that there was a division between Stone and the poems that came to be known under the general title Tristia. This title, incidentally, was given to the collection by Kuzmin, and the book itself is a miscellany of jumbled-up manuscripts taken to Berlin by the publisher without M's knowledge. " Hope Against Hope page 192.
She is not critical about this fact (what a relief not to have criticism!) , but simply points it out and in the next chapter of the book, Cycle 41, she continues to discuss the poems, and their relation to M's sense of phases, and what it was that constituted a book for him, or a cycle of verses and the interplay between the varied strands .
--------------------- I came across this striking cover of Tristia. It would be interesting to know how the editions of M';s have fared since she wrote her memoir, and how this edition came to be. Did the editors know that the poems in it were not organized by the poet, and if they did, how did they consider this?
(them versers that
themselves to o
seriouslee become
bad poets)
"TRISTIA", d'Ossip Mandelstam. Livre de poésies publié aux éditions "Pétropolis" (Berlin- St Pétersbourg) en 1922, à 3 000 exemplaires dont 100 numérotés. Illustration de la couverture de Mstislav Doboujinsky.
so each past of the poem
runs ahead to its future
in the receiving loving hands of its reader
lips
So all poem co-existing in the folding and un
rolling
"Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder? "- M says this to Nadia in Hope against Hope.... that is, Mandelestam says this to his wife.
indeed ~ Russians receive poetry vividly ~ in bushels of heaps it ~ and take it to heart. we once did . memorizing , thank god, huge swathes of verse ~
George Stein er in a talk I heard once speaks of Russian audiences reciting along with a poet as he recited to the em one of Shakespeare's sonnets...
what beauty
and audience
of 4000 or more
reciting together
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
us readers of delirium....
------------------------ Steiner the impassioned polyglot
and Wordsworth too was able to cite from memory great chunks of poetry ....
but us half wits we can barely read our reaching hands spacing for text.....
now having said all that terribly sad truth
perspective which claims poetry was once based on oral traditions... true as it is.....
One cannot imagine Finnegans Wake being memorized and handed down
its memorization
the writing is the memorization
and the fact of
memory as text the tongue licking backward as its speaking self composes
the written word ~
hands which hold
and those that clutch
and
most living those hands
which write...
(this is a memory of a verse by Tzara written
in the 50's).
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I've also come across this blog
devoted to reading Russian books Lizok's Bookshelf
------------------------ et voila Tristia
Recited in the original Russian, followed by a reading of Joseph Brodsky's English translation
oral forgotten
tradition
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______________________ __________________________________ poets, including myself, should not be