"We Live," the poem that proved [Osip] Mandelstam's undoing, what has been called "a 16-line death sentence" or "The Stalin Epigraph." In it, Mandelstam makes mention of "our Kremlin gremlin" with "his jackhammering jackboots" and how "a hairy cockroach crawls along his grin," a snook cocked at the Stalin 'stache. Mandelstam had no intention of speaking truth to power, only truth about power, but recited the poem to, among others, an informer.from Frank Wilson: The Philadelphia Inquirer: Solemn magic in translated poetry
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