Osip Mandelstam, Henry Gifford, Sidney Monas, Clarence Brown, Robert Hughes Journey to Armenia

The last published work of a great poet who wrote a few lines attacking Stalin and was shortly thereafter exiled to Siberia where he died near Vladivostok six years later. An inimitable volume, Journey to Armenia is a travel book in name only.Osip Mandelstam visited Armenia in 1930, and during the eight months of his stay he rediscovered his poetic voice and was inspired to write an experimental meditation on the country and its ancient culture.'Armenia brought him back to his true self, a self depending on the "inner ear" which could never play a poet false. There was everything congenial to him in this country of red and ochre landscape, ancient churches, and resonant pottery.' - Henry Gifford.This edition also includes the companion-piece, "Conversation about Dante," which Seamus Heaney called "Osip Mandelstam's astonishing fantasia on poetic creation." "Conversation about Dante," Mandelstam's incomparable apologia for poetic freedom and challenge to the Bolshevik establishment, was dictated by the poet to his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1934-35, during the last phase of his itinerant life. It has close ties to the Journey.