Reviews

Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandel’štam

aflaim's review

reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.0

"I consult frankly with the chalcedony, the cornelian, crystalized gypsum, spar, quartz, etc. I understood then that a stone is a kind of diary to the weather, a meteorological concentrate as it were. A stone is nothing but weather excluded from the atmospheric space and put away in functional space... All geological changes and displacements can be resolved completely into elements of the weather. " Conversation about Dante, pg. 165-166.

dajna's review against another edition

3.0

Lui: andiamo in Armenia
Io: ok perfetto
Lui: guarda il sito archeologico
Io: bello, ci sono resti...
Lui: le farfalle
Io: sì, ma non stavamo parlando di rovine?
Lui: Linneo! Papaveri! I papaveri sono brutti
Io: Ma no dai, a me piacc...
Lui: guarda il monastero!
Io: Aspe...
Lui: la lingua armena!
Io: sì ma...
Lui: tornati a Mosca
Io: quando?!?!
Lui: poesie!
Io: mai provato il Ritalin?

Scherzi a parte, mi sono trovata a 2/3 del libro senza sapere come. E viene voglia di tornare indietro, per rileggere più lentamente e assimilare l'entusiasmo di Mandelstam, poeta e filologo.
Forse non ho imparato poi tanto sulla geografia armena, ma ora so che è una regione che suscita eccitazione.

graywacke's review

4.0

A tough and somewhat random book for me. I know very little about this Jewish Soviet poet and his strained and eventually fatal relationship to his state. These essays were written in 1933 when he was sort of politely exiled to Armenia. The main essay, ‘Journey‘, is about Armenia with much extra going on in the subtext. It includes a mixture of classical Greek and Christian references, and a criticism of Darwin in favor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It kind of all went right by me. A second essay on Dante was really fascinating about Dante and poetry and, I think, has some interesting embedded criticism of the then Soviet Union.

"If a physicist should conceive of the desire, after taking apart the nucleus of an atom, to put it back together again, he would be like the partisans of descriptive and explanatory poetry, for whom Dante represents, for all time, a plague and a threat."

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45. Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante by Osip Mandelstam
translation: from Russian 1977
published: 1933
format: 185-page Notting Hill 2011 hardcover
acquired: 2019
read: Aug 20-29
time reading: 6 hr 12 min, 2 min/page
rating: 4
locations: Armenia
about the author: Polish-born Jewish Soviet poet who grew up in St. Petersburg, and died in a gulag. 1891-1938

Three parts:
'Mandelstam and the Journey' by Henry Gifford, 1979
'Journey to Armenia' translated by Sidney Monas, 1977
'Conversation about Dante' translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes, 1977

rickmanreader's review against another edition

5.0

I think Henry Gifford gets it right in his introduction:

Always, whether in verse or prose, he expects to be met with the ready perceptiveness that Dante, as Madelstam points out, so greatly valued. "You grasp things, on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions -- this is Dante's favorite form of praise."

Mandelstam in Journey to Armenia is always on the wing.

wynkyn's review against another edition

Dreamlike travel journal. OM was captivated by Armenia, railing against Darwinian thought and rediscovering his muse. Unique but perhaps mercifully short.