Latest Christian Wiman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

  Christian Wiman

  Perception, Different, Demand

  Source: bigthink.com

• I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.

  Christian Wiman

  Country, Thinking, Missing

  Source: bigthink.com

• Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.

  Christian Wiman

  Two, Poet, Anna

  Source: bigthink.com

• The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.

  Christian Wiman

  Emotional, Lenses, Work And Life

  Source: bigthink.com

• Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

  Christian Wiman

  Genius, Artistic, Century

  Source: bigthink.com

• I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.

  Christian Wiman

  Soul, Poet, Range

  Source: bigthink.com

• Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

  Christian Wiman

  Brain

  Source: bigthink.com

• I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

  Christian Wiman

  Real, Thinking, Doe

  Source: bigthink.com

• Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

  Christian Wiman

  Ideas, Musical, Style

  Source: bigthink.com

• I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

  Christian Wiman

  Thinking, Smell, Tests

  Source: bigthink.com