Episode 069 Alone I stare Into the frost's white face - Osip Mandelstam

Connor and Jack reach back to 1937 and discuss this unsettling, icy gem from Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam. They talk embedded metaphors (embedaphors), possible political readings, and the value of treating a poem like this one as an experience rather than a puzzle.

Learn more about Mandelstam, here: www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/osip-mandelstam Read John High's translators' notes, here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi…p-mandelstam

Alone I stare into the frost's white face
By: Osip Mandelstam
Translated by: John High

Alone I stare into the frost's white face.
It's going nowhere, and I — from nowhere
Everything ironed flat, pleated without wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
the squint itself, at east...
The ten-fold forest almost the same...
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.