Translated by Andrew Davis
2024

Osip Mandelstam: Two Poems brings together two important long poems The Man Who Found a Horseshoe (1923) and the Verses on the Unknown Soldier (1937). These poems were composed at the two most critical junctures in Mandelstam’s life and in his work. The Man Who Found a Horseshoe (1923) was written as the period of his early success was coming to a close, and the difficulty of an accommodation, whether practical or existential, with the new world brought by the Bolshevik revolution becoming increasingly apparent. Unable to publish his own verse, reduced to translation to make a living, by mid-decade he ceased to write poetry altogether. He recovered his voice again only in the early 1930s. Verses on the Unknown Soldier (1937) was written in exile in Voronezh, a year before he disappeared into the gulag. The poem is burdened both with the sense of his own approaching end and of the general catastrophe just over the horizon. Absolute confidence in his own voice is characteristic of Mandelstam’s poetry, as well as a crystalline clarity of vision and expression. But the feeling of coming to an end, of a need for reappraisal, of a lack of audience or interlocutor, gives to these two poems the extra poignancy of introspection, inner resolution despite the uncertainty of the future, and a restrained but courageous acceptance in the presence of personal defeat and impending disaster.

Hand set in Kis-Janson types cast by Rainer Gerstenberg / D. Stempel AG, and printed letterpress on Somerset Book. Sewn and bound by hand, and laid into a dust jacket with letterpress paste-down label to cover. 24 pages. 6.25 x 9.25 inches.

Edition of 175 copies
$40