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Unread 03-06-2018, 03:55 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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I've got a W.S. Merwin Mandelstam I'm fond of, but that Wiman version seems very nice. The ending seems ambiguous to me - nothing more or no longer? And I wonder whether the Russian plays that game. I'll have to ask my wife.
My favorite Mandelstam is the Stalin epigram. Here's the Merwin/Brown version:

The Stalin Epigram

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.


John
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