Valentin Yemelin
on translating Osip Mandelstam
Earlier translations often fell into two categories: mechanical literary renderings or freer adaptations. The debate over Mandelstam’s translation, framed by D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov, reflects the classic tension between poetic freedom and literal fidelity. Lawrence’s versions, based on cribs, read more like creative adaptations — capturing mood but reshaping Mandelstam into Lawrence’s own idiom. Nabokov, by contrast, rejected such liberties, demanding near word-for-word exactness even if the result seemed awkward in English. At the heart of this dispute lies a fundamental question: should a translation recreate the poem’s effect in the new language, or preserve its exact structure and meaning?
Modern scholarship suggests that neither extreme fully serves Mandelstam. Lawrence risks distortion; Nabokov risks unreadability. The most successful translators seek a middle path, honoring Mandelstam’s precision while retaining poetic vitality. The translations presented here attempt to follow this middle course, though leaning somewhat closer to Nabokov’s approach. They aim to preserve the sound of Mandelstam’s poetry while closely following the meaning and maintaining structure — including rhyme, meter, and intonation — as faithfully as possible to the originals. This approach contrasts with many earlier versions.
about the author
In 1891 Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw (then part of the Russian Empire) to a Jewish family. He grew up in St. Petersburg, where he attended the elite Tenishev School, and later continued his studies in Paris and Heidelberg.
As a leading figure of the Acmeist movement, Mandelstam championed clarity, precision, and cultural depth, setting his work apart from the mysticism of Symbolism. His early poetry collections Stone (1913, 1916) and Tristia (1922) established him as one of the foremost Russian poets. His life, however, was overshadowed by Stalinist repression. In 1933, he wrote an poem about the dictator, which soon came to Stalin’s attention. This led to escalating persecutions: he was arrested, exiled, arrested again, and finally died in a transit labor camp near Vladivostok in 1938. He was buried in a mass grave at an unknown location.
Mandelstam’s poetry is rich in classical, biblical, and historical allusions, reflecting his belief in the continuity between past and present. His verse combines musicality, exact imagery, and philosophical meditation, often revolving around memory, mortality, and cultural survival. Even in exile, his later poems embody both despair and defiance, preserving an inner space of freedom against totalitarianism.
about the translator
Valentin Yemelin, born in 1956 in Moscow, Russia, has lived in Norway since 2001.Yemelin graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Technology in 1976 and from Harvard University in 1997. He currently works at the Collaborating Center of the UN Environment Programme.
Yemelin writes poetry in both Russian and English. His translations from English, Russian, German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian have appeared in the poetry magazines Interpoezia, The Write Launch (USA), Vyshgorod (Estonia), and Emigrant Lira (Belgium) . His original poems have been published in White Raven and online in the magazines White Mammoth, Bukvitsa and Golden Fleece. He translated Dennis Nurkse’s family saga Voices over Water and, together with Galina Itskovich, published the translated anthologies Female Poetry of America and Narrative Poetry. He is a laureate of the Fourth International Festival of Russian Poetry and Culture in Israel, and the Fifth World Festival of Emigrant Lira. He was also a finalist of the 13th International Festival of Russian Poetry Pushkin in Britain, the Open Baltic Championship of 2015, and the International World Cup of Poetry, in 2017.
