Mandelstam's "Tristia": Thomas de Waal Presents English Translation

Thomas de Waal, British journalist and Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, presented his English translation of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam's collection "Tristia" during a literary evening with journalist Mark Grigoryan on June 29 at Common Ground Cafe, Yerevan.
De Waal, who began this ambitious project in 1988 as a young Oxford literature student, spent 34 years completing the translation. Originally motivated by the belief that no one had translated the complete collection as an integral work, he set himself the challenging goal of preserving Mandelstam's complex meters and rhyme schemes. The project was finally completed during lockdown in time for the collection's centenary in 2022, though it was ultimately published in 2023 by Arc Publications.
The discussion, dedicated to the memory of historian Vartan Gregorian, explored Mandelstam's significance as arguably the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century. Grigoryan noted three key contradictions about Mandelstam: though remembered for his tragic death under Stalin in 1938, he was fundamentally a poet of life; he was simultaneously a modernist and classicist; and despite being a Jewish poet from Lithuania, he loved the Christian South and the Caucasus.
"Tristia," written between 1916-1921, captures the revolutionary upheaval through references to Ovid's exile by the Black Sea, creating what De Waal described as "a requiem for the loss of a culture in the middle of revolution." The evening featured readings of several poems in both Russian and English, including the famous opening poem set in Crimean Koktebel, where Mandelstam stayed with artist Sergei Sudeikin and his wife Vera (who later became Vera Stravinsky).
The event was held as part of the 2025 Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia, organized by the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, which took place across Batumi, Yerevan, and Tbilisi from June 25 to July 13.