A Necklace of Bees: Selected Poems

Poetry. Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891. Professor Donald Rayfield, in his notes to Chapter 42 and the Goldfinch by Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, wrote that Mandelstam’s poetry of the thirties, almost all unpublished in his own lifetime, marks him as arguably the greatest Russian poet this century. He died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938. Elaine Feinstein, in her foreword to A NECKLACE OF BEES, writes that Maria Enzensberger has chosen not only early poems where Mandelstam is grateful for the quiet joy of being alive, but later poems which have the ‘flavour of smoke and grief;’ the abrupt, intimate, miraculous poems of Mandelstam’s years in exile. And here these translations speak with heartbreaking clarity. Maria Enzensberger was born in Moscow in 1943. She died in London in 1991.