Irving Layton reads Osip Mandelshtam
Thank HowardM2. Osip Mandelshtam (1891 - 1940) I once did an hour-long T. V. show reading from your Stamen and Tristia : out there were my compatriots who had never before heard of your name and pain, your nightmare fate; of course, the impresario spoke impressively about your stay in Paris where you mastered the French symbolists, your skill as translator (what pre-Belsen Jew hadn't promiscuously shacked up with five or six gentile cultures?), the Hellenic feeling in your prose and poems -- to be brief, he filled in the familiar picture of enlightened Jew, ass bard to the winds Butr when that self-taught master symbolist il miglior fabbro put you on his list of touchables that was the end; you perished in the land waste of Siberia, precisely where no one knows and few care for in that stinking imperium whose literature you adorned like a surreal Star of David you're still an unclaimed name, a Jewish ghost who wanders occasionally into enclaves of forlorn intellectuals liste...