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Osip Mandelstam Quotes
1891–1938 Poland
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Mandelshtam; Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м; January 15, 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist, one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets.
Poland Essayists Poets Translators Also known as: Mandelstam, Osip
Random Osip Mandelstam quote
15 quotes
Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
Why can't we shake things up, why can't these good translators be utilized in collective undertakings?
ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
One question conditions the dynamics and balance of color in the composition of a painting: whence the source of light?
The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.
Apples, bread, potatoes-from now on they will quench not only physical but spiritual hunger.
The separation of Culture and the State is the most significant event of our revolution.
Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form, and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs, and gateways insure the State against the ravages of time.
Speed, the pace of the present, cannot be measured by subways or skyscrapers, but only by the cheerful grass thrusting itself forth from under city stones.
Today a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place. In sacred frenzy poets speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible.
Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution
the word wanders freely around the thing, like the soul around an abandoned, but not forgotten body.
the poet has no fear of recurrence and is easily intoxicated on Classical wine.
Every book should be an incentive to studying the language. Every book should provide at least some contact with the original, for example, a parallel text and a glossary. At present we are struggling to take the translation business away from the caste leader, for whom the mass reader is a fiction, an "easy mark" ignorant of foreign languages.
ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
It is indeed astonishing that all are obsessed with poets and cannot tear themselves away from them. You would think that once they were read, that was that. Transcended, as they say now. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
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