John Joubert

Tristia Op. 118

Tristia is a song-cycle to words by Osip Mandelstam, one of the founding members of the so-called Acmeist school of Russian poetry - a movement which has much in common with both Symbolism and Imagism. As a Jewish dissident who had survived the Russian Revolution of 1917 and fallen foul of the subsequent Soviet regime, Mandelstam found it increasingly difficult to get either recognition or employment. In 1934 he was arrested for having written a satirical poem about Stalin. He perished four years later in a labour camp. Though he died in complete obscurity - nobody seems to know for certain the exact time or place of his death - his memory was kept alive by the courage and devotion of his wife Nadezhda whose book, Hope against Hope, is a moving chronicle of their last few years together.

The five poems which make up the cycle are taken from the collection published in 1922 under the title, Tristia, a reference to the work of the same name by the exiled Latin poet, Ovid. The poems are set in English, but even in translation they convey the essence of Mandelstam's highly personal, associative style. As such they express the reactions of an alienated, sensitive and classically-educated outsider to the turbulent events he had so recently lived through.

The five poems which make up the cycle are taken from the collection published in 1922 under the title, Tristia, a reference to the work of the same name by the exiled Latin poet, Ovid. The poems are set in English, but even in translation they convey the essence of Mandelstam's highly personal, associative style. As such they express the reactions of an alienated, sensitive and classically-educated outsider to the turbulent events he had so recently lived through.