Selected Poems

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

MANDELSHTAM: SELECTED POEMS

Osip Mandelshtam was born in 1891 of Jewish parents and was brought up in St Petersburg. He studied at Heidelberg University and the University of St Petersburg. The first volume of his poetry, Kamen (Stone), appeared in 1913 and was followed by Tristia (1922) and Poems (1928). His persecution by the Soviet authorities for his evident lack of ideological conformism began in earnest in the 1930s, and in 1934 he was arrested and eventually exiled to Voronezh. He was finally re-arrested in 1938. He died in Eastern Siberia, on the way to a labour camp.

James Greene was born in Berlin in 1938. He took a degree in French and Russian at Oxford and studied psychology and English literature at London University. His second collection of poems, A Sad Paradise, was published in 1990. In 1985 he won first prize in the British Comparative Literature Association’s translation competition for his versions of Fernando Pessoa and in 1986 second prize in the TLS/Cheltenham Festival of Literature poetry competition. Earlier versions of some of the poems included in the present volume were published by Elek (1977), Granada (1980) and Angel Books (1988) and read at the National Theatre, the Mermaid, Riverside Studios, the Voice Box (Festival Hall), both the Oxford and Cambridge Poetry Festivals and on Radio 3. Three of his translations of Mandelshtam are included in The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation.

OSIP MANDELSHTAM

SELECTED POEMS

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED

BY JAMES GREENE

FOREWORDS BY NADEZHDA MANDELSHTAM

AND DONALD DAVIE

INTRODUCTION BY DONALD RAYFIELD

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Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

This selection first published in Great Britain, under the title The Eyesight of Wasps,

by Angel Books, London 1989

Revised edition first published under the present title by Penguin Books 1991

Selection, translations, Preface and notes copyright © James Greene, 1989, 1991

Foreword by Nadezhda Mandelshtam copyright © Nadezhda Mandelshtam, 1976

Foreword by Donald Davie copyright © Donald Davie, 1977

Introduction copyright © Donald Rayfield, 1988

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196539-0

To Ron Holmes, Maxwell Shorter and Antony Wood

Fine fingers quiver;

A fragile body breathes:

A boat sliding across

Fathomless silent seas.

1909

Few live for the sake of eternity.

But if the passing moment makes you anxious

Your lot is terror and your house precarious!

1912

And alone, infinity, I read

Your primer:

Your wild leafless herbal –

Logarithm-table of prodigious roots.

1933

Like poppies, your eyebrows

Open up a dangerous path.

Why am I in love like a janissary

With this tiny volatile red –

The pitiful crescent of your lips?

1934

Angelic criminal, cheeky schoolboy,

Alongside the Gothic a villain:

He spat on the spider-like law –

Incomparable François Villon.

1937

Aortas fill with blood.

A murmur resounds through the ranks:

– I was born in ’94,

I was born in ’92 …

And, clutching the worn-out year of my birth,

Herded wholesale with the herd,

I whisper through anaemic lips:

I was born in the night of January the second and third

In the unreliable year

Of eighteen-ninety something or other,

And the centuries surround me with fire.

1937

Contents

Foreword by Nadezhda Mandelshtam

Foreword by Donald Davie

Translator’s Preface

Introduction by Donald Rayfield

FROM STONE (1913, 1916, 1923 AND 1928)

The careful muffled sound

Suddenly, from the dimly lit hall

To read only children’s books

On pale-blue enamel

What shall I do with the body I’ve been given

A sadness beyond words

Words are unnecessary

Silentium

Ear-drums stretch their sensitive sail

Like the shadow of sudden clouds

I grew, rustling like a reed

Sultry dusk covers the couch

How slowly the horses move

Light sows a meagre beam

The sea-shell

I hate the light

In the haze your image

No, not the moon, but a bright clock-face

The traveller

The casino

The Lutheran

Hagia Sophia

Notre Dame

Poisoned bread, satiated air

Horses’ hooves … The clatter

There are orioles in the woods

Nature is Roman, and mirrored in Rome

Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails

Herds of horses gaily neigh or graze

Unpublished in the Struve/Filippov editions

Newly reaped ears

Two poems first published by Struve/Filippov, 1964

The hunters have trapped you

The old men of Euripides, an abject throng

FROM TRISTIA (1922)

– How the splendour of these veils and of this dress

We shall die in transparent Petropolis

This night is irredeemable

Disbelieving the miracle of resurrection

Out of the bottle the stream of golden honey poured so slowly

Spring’s transparent-grey asphodels

Tristia

Sisters: heaviness and tenderness bear the same insignia

Return to the incestuous lap

When Psyche – life – descends among shades

I have forgotten the word I wanted to say

For the sake of delight

Here is the pyx, like a golden sun

Because I had to let go of your arms

When the city moon looks out on the streets

When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped

I like the grey silences under the arches

FROM POEMS (1928)

I was washing at night in the courtyard

To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch

Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips

As the leaven swells

I climbed into the tousled hayloft

My time

Whoever finds a horseshoe

1 January 1924

TWO POEMS PUBLISHED IN NOVY MIR (1931 AND 1932)

Armenia

Batyushkov

POEMS PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY

Self-portrait

I was only in a childish way connected with the established order

Help me, O Lord, to get through this night

For the resounding glory of eras to come

I drink to the blossoming epaulette

Impressionism

Ariosto

We exist, without sensing our country beneath us

The body of King Arshak is unwashed

Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges

Black earth

Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips

You took away my seas and running jumps and sky

My country conversed with me

For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights

A wave advances – one wave breaking another’s backbone

I shall perform a smoky rite

I shall not return my borrowed dust

I can’t make sense of today

Like a belated present

I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world

You still haven’t died, you’re still not alone

I look the frost in the face, alone

Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes

Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger

Don’t compare: anyone alive is matchless

What has contended with oxide and alloys

The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance

Listening, listening to the early ice

A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp

Where can I put myself this January?

Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark

Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue

I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry

Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe

Armed with the eyesight of narrow wasps

I am plunged into a lion’s den, a fort

If our enemies take me

Life’s reticulations loosen, madness looms

This is what I want most of all

This azure island was exalted by its potters

As if words were not enough

I raise this greenness to my lips

With her delightful uneven way of walking

Notes and Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Foreword by Nadezhda Mandelshtam

I think that the most difficult task in the world is the translation of verses, particularly of a true poet, in whose verses there is no discrepancy between the form and the content (or meaning) – both of them always new and but a bit different (with no great disparity between them) – and where the ego of the poet is always strikingly felt. Marina Tsvetayeva said she could write as Mandelshtam did but that she didn’t want to. She was a great poet but she was greatly mistaken. She could be influenced by Mayakovsky and Pasternak and remain Tsvetayeva because they were innovators and therefore easily aped. But Mandelshtam composed verses in tradition, which is far more difficult to imitate.

Mr Robert Lowell’s translations are very free; Mr Paul Celan’s into German also free. But both are a very far cry from the original text. As far as I know the translations of Mr Greene are the best I ever saw. I can’t give my opinion about the Italian translations, as I don’t know Italian as well as English, French and German. As for Elsa Triolet’s, they are as naïve and vulgar as she was.

Mandelshtam said that the contents are squeezed from the form as water from a sponge.* If the sponge is dry, there would be no moisture at all. So, to render the content – which Mr Greene has succeeded in doing – is to give, in a way, the form or harmony, the harmony which can’t be rendered in translation, the harmony which is quite simple and at the same time mysteriously complicated. Poetry is a mystery.

Nadezhda Mandelshtam, 1976

Foreword by Donald Davie

Of Mandelshtam’s Octets, Robert Chandler has said that ‘the informing energy of the poem stems from, is a part of, the universal impulse to form, which leads equally to the creation of a petal or a cupola, the pattern of a group of sailing-boats or a poem.’ And Mr Chandler may be right. Yet as I worked at the Octets* it seemed to me on the contrary that Mandelshtam was distinguishing one kind of form from another, and was celebrating only those forms that are ‘bent in’, arced, the form of a foetus or a cradle, specifically not the open-ended and discontinuous mere ‘pattern’ (rather than ‘form’) that a group of sailing-boats may fall into.

I stress this because I am inclined to see in it the clue to what is distinctive about this poet, and what is distinctively daunting about the challenge he presents to his translators. If I am right, Mandelshtam’s poems themselves yearn towards, and achieve, forms that are ‘bent in’, rounded, sounding a full bell-note. Moreover, because what the poems say is at one with the forms they find for the saying, we see why it is that, as Clarence Brown tells us, for Mandelshtam ‘cognition’ is always ‘recognition’ – re-cognition, a return upon itself, a ‘coming round again’.

And nothing else, so far as I can see, will enable us to reconcile Anna Akhmatova’s firm declaration, ‘He had no poetic forerunners,’ with his widow’s no less firm admonition: ‘Mandelshtam … unlike innovators such as Mayakovsky and Pasternak … composed verses in tradition, which is far more difficult to imitate.’ What sort of a poet can this be, who is ‘traditional’ and yet has ‘no poetic forerunners’? We solve this riddle by saying that in his techniques Mandelshtam was indeed unprecedented, yet the techniques were made to serve a form – why not say, simply, a beauty? – that rejoiced in calling upon every precedent one might think of, from Homer to Ovid, to the builders of Santa Sophia, to Dante and Ariosto and Racine. For it is true, surely: the sort of form to which Mandelshtam vows himself alike in nature and in art, the form of the bent-in and the rounded-upon-itself, is the most ancient and constant of all European understandings of the beautiful – it is what long ago recognized in the circle the image of perfection. This profoundly traditional strain and aspiration in Mandelshtam explains why the Russia of his lifetime is seldom imaged directly in his poetry, and why, when it is so imaged, the image is overshadowed by others from ancient Greece or from Italy; it explains why domes and cupolas and shells (whether whorled or scalloped) appear in his poetry so often; and it explains why the hackneyed figures of the sky as a dome and a vault, and of the sea as curved round the earth’s curve, appear in that poetry so insistently and with such otherwise unexplained potency. If we were to call Mandelshtam ‘classical’, this is what we might mean, or what we ought to mean. And nothing is further from what may reasonably be seen as the characteristic endeavour of the Western European and American of this century, in all the arts – that is to say, the finding of beauty in the discontinuous and the asymmetrical, the open-ended and indeed the adventitious.

Just here arises the peculiarly extreme difficulty of translating Mandelshtam into English.