Selected Poems

About the Author and the Translator

Osip Mandelshtam was born in 1891 of Jewish parents and was brought up in St Petersburg. He studied at Heidelberg University and the University of St Petersburg. The first volume of his poetry, Kamen (Stone), appeared in 1913 and was followed by Tristia (1922) and Poems (1928). His persecution by the Soviet authorities for his evident lack of ideological conformism began in earnest in the 1930s, and in 1934 he was arrested and eventually exiled to Voronezh. He was finally re-arrested in 1938. He died in Eastern Siberia, on the way to a labour camp.

James Greene was born in Berlin in 1938. He took a degree in French and Russian at Oxford and studied psychology and English literature at London University. His second collection of poems, A Sad Paradise, was published in 1990. In 1985 he won first prize in the British Comparative Literature Association’s translation competition for his versions of Fernando Pessoa and in 1986 second prize in the TLS/Cheltenham Festival of Literature poetry competition. Earlier versions of some of the poems included in the present volume were published by Elek (1977), Granada (1980) and Angel Books (1988) and read at the National Theatre, the Mermaid, Riverside Studios, the Voice Box (Festival Hall), both the Oxford and Cambridge Poetry Festivals and on Radio 3. Three of his translations of Mandelshtam are included in The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation.