“One of the century’s greatest lyric poets…Osip Mandelstam has tempted a formidable array of English poets. Through them we can perceive a glittering poetry, at once allusive, hardeyed, amd uncompromising. We see Leningrad black and shining, sitting like a hunched wildcat or transformed into ‘transparent Petropolis/ where Proserpina rules over us;’ Moscow, threatening Asiatic barbarity; the Crimea’s sensual richness. Much of this recorded over the years of Stalin’s murderous cat-and-mouse game.”
— Elaine Feinstein, The Sunday Times
“In the thirty years that have passed since the Brown/Merwin versions appeared none of the many attempts to indicate Mandelstam’s vitality, to draw out his multitude of textile warps, have come anywhere near what they achieved. Seemingly understated, these translations have the tension and memorability of art. With intensity, precision, and immediacy, Brown and Merwin give us a great poet, whose work, like that of Yeats, takes place, dramatically, on the stage of history. Mandelstam is the crucial poet of ‘our wolfhound age’, our ‘tyrant century’.”
— Mark Rudman
“[Brown’s] introduction to this book of Mandelstam’s poems is balanced, informative and personal.”
— Columbus Dispatch
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