S. Kuzin; and, above all, his passion for language, his philology. As elsewhere, he tells his story by means of significant association rather than linear narrative. A chapter on the island of Sevan and its architectural “digs” is followed by a chapter on Zamoskvorech’e, the old merchants’ section of Moscow, setting for so many of the plays of Ostrovsky, dramas of personal and cultural tyranny, and for the poems and essays of Apollon Grigoriev with their exaltation of the “seven-stringed guitar” and the home-soil aspects of Russian nationalism. The fullness of Armenia is contrasted in restrospect with the “watermelon-emptiness of Russia,” with Zamoskvorech’e, where Mandelstam himself had lived, and its “cheery little houses” and “nasty little souls and timidly oriented windows.” Armenia might survive the five-year plans with their hypostasization of nineteenth-century scientific rationalist “Buddhism”—but Zamoskvorech’e?

In connection with thoughts on evolutionary theory, Mandelstam uses the word “development” (razvitie), which, of course, also has many associations with the five-year plan. It is a word he dislikes: “A plant is a sound evoked by the wand of a termenvox, pulsating in a sphere oversaturated with wave processes. It is the envoy of a living storm that rages permanently in the universe—akin in equal measure to stone and lightning! A plant in the world—that is an event, a happening, an arrow; and not boring, bearded ‘development’!”34 The passage recalls Mandelstam’s poem, no. 254, on Lamarck, and carries as well the implicit comparison of “a plant” with “a poem,” an ineluctable resemblance to Mandelstam’s theory of composition as expressed in “Conversation about Dante” and elsewhere. Even the adjective “bearded” as applied to “development” recalls the Italian idiom Che barba! and the expressive gesture that normally accompanies it. Mandelstam’s biological is really poetic theory:

All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, something labial or palatal, a sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying one’s expectation.35

That a Jew should identify closely with Armenia and Armenians is of course not at all unusual or surprising, but an instance of the natural kinship of gifted diasporic peoples, often persecuted, often mistaken one for the other by “the heathen.” What country, as Nadezhda Mandelstam asked, could be more worthy of being called “the younger sister of Judea”?36 Since the mood is eschatological, there is Mount Ararat, where the ark came to rest; and there are the Gog and Magog of the long dark night of imperial oriental siege and conquest. But Armenia resembles Greece and Italy as much as Judea: it is a wine-growing region, with the culture habits that accompany the grape, and there are even traces of an ancient goat cult in the mountains. Above all, Mandelstam is fascinated by the jangling of the philological keys, with his discovery that the Japhetic verbs “to see,” “to hear,” and “to understand” once coalesced into a single semantic bundle.37

Armenia is the first Christian kingdom and the longest Christian survivor as a cultural entity. It is the homeland of Christian architecture—both the Romanesque and the Gothic. Mandelstam sees it as a place of renewal, whose language will be studied when the phonetic ores of Europe and America are all used up, a place lifted outside of time like the Eucharist. Armenians were a people

whom you respect, with whom you sympathize, of whom you are, though a stranger, proud. The Armenians’ fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things—all this said to me: you’re awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly.

Wasn’t this because I found myself among people, renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of the zodiac or of a rose inscribed in stone?38

Mandelstam’s farewell journey—the longer ones he was to make were not of his own choosing—reinvigorated him and renewed his gift. “Parting,” he wrote, “is the younger sister of death,” and his departure from Armenia, “the younger sister of Judea,” was a preparation for death.39 The apocalyptic theme is unmistakable. Yet Mandelstam’s apocalypse is also an apokothastasis: he looks forward not only to the end, but also to resurrection and renewal. Amidst the crumbling of walls and exhaustion of phonetic ores, he counts on “the complicity of those united in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing.”40

A world come to an end; the world goes on.

Note

Note: A previous version of this introductory essay appeared in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 17: 357–373 and was reprinted, with a few changes, in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).

* Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1973 State University of New York.

Conversation about Dante

Translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes

Così gridai colla faccia levata.

(Inferno, XVI, 76)

I.

Poetic speech is a crossbred process, and it consists of two sonorities. The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second sonority is the speech proper, that is, the intonational and phonetic work performed by the said instruments.

Understood thus, poetry is not a part of nature, not even the best or choicest part. Still less is it a reflection of nature, which would lead to a mockery of the law of identity; but it is something that, with astonishing independence, settles down in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating nature as acting it out by means of its instruments, which are commonly called images.

It is only very conditionally possible to speak of poetic speech or thought as sonorous, for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, and of these one, taken by itself, is absolutely mute, while the other, taken apart from its instrumental metamorphosis, is devoid of all significance and all interest and is subject to paraphrase, which is in my opinion the truest sign of the absence of poetry. For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.

Dante is a master of the instruments of poetry and not a manufacturer of images. He is a strategist of transformations and cross-breedings, and least of all is he a poet in the “All-European” and outwardly cultural sense of this word.

The wrestlers winding themselves into a tangle in the arena may be regarded as an example of a transformation of instruments and a harmony.

These naked and glistening wrestlers who walk about pluming themselves on their physical prowess before grappling in the decisive fight. . . .1

The modern cinema, meanwhile, with its metamorphosis of the tapeworm, turns into a malicious parody on the function of instruments in poetic speech, since its frames move without any conflict and merely succeed one another.

Imagine something understood, grasped, torn out of obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately upon the completion of the act of understanding and execution.

In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. Semantic satisfaction is equivalent to the feeling of having carried out a command.

The wave signals of meaning disappear once they have done their work: the more powerful they are, the more yielding, and the less prone to linger.

Otherwise one cannot escape the rote drilling, the hammering in of those prepared nails called “cultural-poetic” images.

External, explanatory imagery is incompatible with the presence of instruments.

The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions.