Ralph Dutli Mandelstam. Meine Zeit, mein Tier Eine Biographie (Mandelstam: My Animal, My Age A Biography) Ammann Verlag, 2003, 640 pp ISBN: 3-250-10449-3 This is the first full biography of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam to be published in any country. This in itself, plus the fact that its Swiss author is the expert on, and translator of, Mandelstam's poetry, establishes the book's importance. Mandelstam was one the most significant of twentieth-century poets, but it is all too easy to pigeon-hole him in clichéd terms: Mandelstam the suffering poet, Mandelstam the anti-Stalinist poet, Mandelstam who lived out the nightmare visions of Kafka, or Mandelstam the poet-martyr. Aware of the pitfalls of biography - a genre about which the poet himself was sceptical - Dutli delivers a full and vivid depiction of the man who was, as Joseph Brodsky reminds us, 'a great poet before the revolution', and, as Pier Paolo Pasolini remarks, was also 'light-footed, inventive, elegant, cheerful, sensual, always in love…and made us the gift of some of the happiest poetry of the century'. Covering a period of history filled with some light but even more often with darkness, and peopled by a colourful cast of artists, poets and friends, this is a fascinating portrait of the poet and his times - and ripe, of course, for translation.