Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam.

Kim Fahner is a poet and the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

What Rafi Aaron does, in Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam, is weave together voices, memories, and imaginings in a palimpsest of poetic beauty. Any poet worth his or her salt knows the story of Osip Mandelstam, the brilliant Russian poet who was imprisoned and tortured because he wrote a poem that criticized Stalin. Mandelstam is also referred to in Seamus Heaney’s collection of essays, Government of the Tongue. In Heaney’s collection, the idea of song (voice) conquering over sorrow (oppression and injustice) is a central theme. This same idea is omnipresent in Aaron’s collection of poems.

Rafi Aaron’s book is deliberately layered, not only in terms of how he writes the pieces but also in how he structures the sections of the book and in how he has written the poems as if he were—in various turns—”the anonymous voice from the camps,” “Osip,” “Nadezhda” (his wife), as well as poems taken from a “researcher’s notes.” The complexity of the work is staggering and must truly have been a labour of love for Aaron. There is certainly a sense that this is a meticulous collection, well thought out and lovingly, artfully crafted.

The importance of preserving the past, including painful parts, is a central theme in this book. In “When Manuscripts Burned,” Aaron writes that “the world was on fire./The ashes fell as snowflakes. Black/became white and people stuck out their tongues to/taste their youth.” Even through the destruction and ruin of printed books, “Poetry was hoarded/and hidden in our bellies.” Poems became “witnesses who/would one day speak for themselves.”

The poems are simply brilliant. Aaron’s language is crystalline, with images and phrases that sing of the power of language, even in the darkest of times. The idea that writing can be so threatening to oppressive political regimes is nothing new, something that we see opposed in the work of PEN Canada today. The idea that writing can have that sort of innate and raw power, the kind of power that threatens and challenges those who oppress and torture, is uplifting. In Osip Mandelstam’s poems, we see the power of language; in Rafi Aaron’s poems, we see that power echoes, singing out in defiance against darker forces that try to crush creativity and peace.