Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Ian Probstein's Mandelstam translations: videos
from Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. (Academic Studies Press, 2022)
"Stalin's Epigram" (November 1933) read in the original Russian by Ian Probstein, 2014. See notes on and translations of this poem by Probstein and others at Jacket2."Stalin's Epigram" (1:04): MP3