The Berlin Writers’ Workshop and Hopscotch Reading Room present a reading to celebrate Osip Mandelstam’s The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems in new translations by Alistair Noon.
The Voronezh Workbooks: Osip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his “Stalin Epigram” in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to Mandelstam’s consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however, they also bear the marks of Mandelstam’s attempts to somehow reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts and in the memory of Mandelstam’s wife and executor, Nadezhda.
Occasional and Joke Poems: Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St. Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to none.
Alistair Noon's publications include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both Nine Arches Press, and a dozen chapbooks, most recently Two Verse Essays (Longbarrow Press). His translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in three volumes from Shearsman Books: Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems (2018), The Voronezh Workbooks, and Occasional and Joke Poems (both 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he's published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.
Poet and translator Justin Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland and earned his BA and PhD from Trinity College. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The Ooaa Bird (1995), Privacy (1999), Fuselage (2002), Waves and Trees (2006), Close Quarters (2011), and Early House (2015). He also wrote the novel Mount Merrion (2013). Quinn moved to Prague in the late 1990s, and his poetry often shows the influence of Anglo, American, and Irish poetry traditions as well as his experiences in the Czech Republic and as a translator of Czech poetry. His translations of poet Petr Borkovec were collected in From the Interior (2008), and Quinn is currently translating the work of Bohuslav Reynek. Quinn’s own work was translated into Czech in the collection Vlny a stromy (2009, translated by Tomáš Fürstenzeller).
Quinn’s scholarly books include Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (2002); American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity & Modern Poetry (2005); and Between Two Fires: Transnationalism & Cold War Poetry (2015). With David Wheatley, Quinn founded the poetry magazine Metre. He is associate professor of American and English literature at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic
Photo credit: Karl Hurst