COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY TRANSLATIONS
[GUMILEV, Nikolai Stepanovich, Osip MANDELSTAM, et al, translators.]
Поэты французского Возрождения [Poety frantsuzskogo vozrozhdeniia; ‘Poets of the French Renaissance’].
Leningrad, Goslitizdat, 1938.
8vo, pp. 302, [2], printed errata slip tipped in at the end; printed in red and black; old library stamps and shelfmarks (cancelled) to title-page and a few internal leaves, else a good copy in the original pale cloth, blocked in red and yellow, trace of labels removed from upper inner corner of front board and from front pastedown.
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Поэты французского Возрождения [Poety frantsuzskogo vozrozhdeniia; ‘Poets of the French Renaissance’].
First edition of a rare anthology of Russian translations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poems by Villon, Marot, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and others. Two of the Villon translations are attributed in the index to Mandelstam, but are in fact by Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921), husband of Anna Akhmatova, who had been arrested and executed for his alleged involvement in the Tagantsev conspiracy.
Since the beginning of the Great Purge in 1937, Mandelstam himself had been under systematic assault from the authorities. This volume was published in January 1938; in May Mandelstam was arrested, in August he was sentenced to five years’ labour, and by the end of December he was dead. The motivations for naming Mandelstam in the roster of translators here are still the subject of debate – the potential risk to the editor and publisher was great. But then so was the very inclusion of the work of a banned author; and apart from Gumilev’s translations there were those by the recently arrested Ivan Lukhachev (1902–1972), whose renditions of verses by Du Bellay, Desportes, and d’Aubigny are left anonymous.
Perhaps there is a clue to motives if we recall that Mandelstam had published an essay ‘François Villon’ in 1910 in which he presented the artist as victim of the state. If Mandelstam was not complicit in the deception, which is itself possible, his name must certainly be a coded attack on the apparatus of oppression.
Not in Library Hub; OCLC four copies only (University of Amsterdam, NYPL, University of Warsaw, and Yale).
