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Today in The New York Review of Books: William Neuman assesses the cost to Venezuela’s opposition—and Venezuela—of inviting the US military to invade; Walker Mimms admires Tatiana Trouvé’s effervescent sculptures; and, from the archives, nine poems by Osip Mandelstam.

William Neuman
Machado Agonistes

The Venezuelan opposition leader courted US military intervention—but she did not get what she bargained for.

Walker Mimms
Dead Ringers

The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past.

Free from the Archives

Osip Mandelstam was born 135 years ago today. After achieving success as a poet in Russia at a young age, in 1934 he was arrested by the NKVD for reciting a poem critical of Stalin and exiled to southwestern Russia. Four years later, during the Great Purge, he was rearrested, charged with counterrevolutionary activities, and sent to a work camp in Vladivostok, where he soon died of typhoid fever.

In the Review’s December 23, 1965, issue, we published Robert Lowell and Olga Andreyev Carlisle’s translations of nine of Mandelstam’s last poems, written while he was in exile.

Osip Mandelstam,
translated by Olga Andreyev Carlisle and Robert Lowell
Nine Poems

Preserve my words forever for their aftertaste of misfortune and smoke,
for their tar of collective patience and conscientious work—
water in the wells of Novgorod must be black and sweetened
to reflect a star with seven fins at Christmas.…

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