Then in spring 1938, with suspicious ease, they were found a place in a country sanatorium: on 2 May, Osip Mandelshtam was arrested. The protectors of poets at the court of Stalin were soon themselves to face the firing squad: Mandelshtam was processed as a counter-revolutionary and, starved, perhaps deranged, died in a transit camp in far-eastern Siberia on 27 December 1938.
With extraordinary determination, like the women at the cross, Nadezhda, Natasha Shtempel and Anna Akhmatova ensured his resurrection and the eventual triumphant entry of his poetry into the Judaic and Hellenic tradition. At enormous risk they preserved what they could in the chaos of the war years and the repressive years of Stalin’s senility. A very few Russian critics, such as Khardzhiev and Shklovsky, and a few intrepid foreign scholars ensured that Mandelshtam’s name, by the mid 1960s, became known not only to two new generations of Russian readers, but to virtually the entire world. As James Greene and, before him, Paul Celan have shown, Mandelshtam’s concern for precision, musicality and continuity make him one of the most translatable poets Russia has ever produced. In Russian poetry, his influence began in the 1960s: as a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky became a vector of Mandelshtamian poetics for Russian poets. While we cannot say that a tradition of Jewish verse exists in Russia, Judaism, as Mandelshtam puts it, ‘like a drop of musk filling a whole house’, adds a tension and internationalism to a lyrical tradition which could not otherwise have survived the rarefaction of the atmosphere.
Donald Rayfield, 1988
FROM
STONE
(1913, 1916, 1923 AND 1928)
The careful muffled sound
Of a fruit breaking loose from a tree
In the middle of the continual singing
Of deep forest silence …
(1) 1908
Suddenly, from the dimly lit hall
You slipped out in a light shawl;
The servants slept on,
We disturbed no one …
(3) 1908
To read only children’s books, treasure
Only childish thoughts, throw
Grown-up things away
And rise from deep sorrows.
I’m tired to death of life,
I accept nothing it can give me,
But I love my poor earth
Because it’s the only one I’ve seen.
In a far-off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing,
And I remember dark tall firs
In a hazy fever.
(4) 1908
On pale-blue enamel,
Conceivable in April,
Birch-trees lifted branches
And eveninged imperceptibly.
Fine netting cut
Thin patterns exactly:
A design on a porcelain plate
Traced accurately
By the considerate artist
On his firmament of glass –
Knowing a short-lived strength,
Oblivious of sad death.
(6) 1909
What shall I do with the body I’ve been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?
For the quiet happiness of breathing, being able
To be alive, tell me to whom I should be grateful?
I am gardener, flower too, and not alone
In the world’s dungeon.
My warmth, my exhalation, one can already see
On the window-pane of eternity.
The pattern printed in my breathing here
Has not been seen before.
Let the moment’s condensation vanish without trace:
The cherished pattern no one can efface.
(8) 1909
A sadness beyond words
Opened two huge eyes,
The vase of flowers woke up
And its crystal made a splash.
The whole room filled
With languor – that sweet medicine!
Such a small kingdom
To swallow so much sleep.
A little red wine,
A little sunlight in May,
And white delicate fingers
Break a thin sponge-cake.
(9) 1909
Words are unnecessary,
There being nothing to learn:
How sad and exemplary
Is an animal’s dark heart!
It has no urge to instruct
And no use for words,
And swims like a young dolphin
Along the grey gulfs of the world.
(11) 1909
Silentium
She who has not yet been born
Is both word and music
And so the imperishable link
Between everything living.
The sea’s chest breathes calmly,
But the mad day sparkles
And the foam’s pale lilac
In its bowl of turbid blue.
May my lips attain
The primordial muteness,
Like a crystal-clear sound
Immaculate since birth!
Remain foam, Aphrodite,
And – word – return to music;
And, fused with life’s core,
Heart be ashamed of heart!
(14) 1910
Ear-drums stretch their sensitive sail,
The widening gaze empties,
An unsinging choir of midnight birds
Swims across the silence.
I am as poor as nature,
As naked as the sky,
And my freedom is spectral
Like the voice of the midnight birds.
I see the unbreathing moon
And a sky whiter than a sheet;
Your strange and morbid world
I welcome, emptiness!
(15) 1910
Like the shadow of sudden clouds,
A visitor from the sea swoops down
And, nipping past, whispers
Along embarrassed shores.
An enormous sail austerely soars;
Dead-white, the wave shrinks back –
And once more will not dare
To touch the shore;
And the boat, rustling through the waves
As though through leaves …
(16) 1910
I grew, rustling like a reed,
Out of a dangerous swamp,
Breathing the air of a forbidden life
With rapture, languor, caresses.
In my cold and marshy refuge
No one notices me,
And I am welcomed by the whisper
Of short autumn minutes.
I enjoy this cruel injury
And in a life like a dream
Secretly am envious of everyone –
And secretly enamoured.
(17) 1910
Sultry dusk covers the couch,
It’s stifling …
Dearest of all to me, perhaps,
The slender cross and secret path.
(19) 1910
How slowly the horses move,
How dark the light the lanterns throw!
Where they are taking me
These strangers surely know.
I am cold, I want to sleep.
Confident of their concern,
Suddenly towards starlight
I’m thrown at the turn.
The nodding of a fevered head,
The caring, icy hand of a stranger;
And, not yet visible to me,
Outlines of dark fir.
(20) 1911
Light sows a meagre beam
Coldly in the sodden forest.
I carry slowly in my heart
The grey bird, sadness.
What shall I do with the wounded bird?
The firmament is silent, dead.
From a belfry masked by mist
Someone has stolen the bells.
And the high ground stands,
Orphaned, dumb –
A white and empty tower
Of quietness and mist.
The morning, unfathomably tender,
Half real and half reverie;
Unquenched drowsiness;
The misty ringing of thoughts …
(21) 1911
The sea-shell
It may be, night, you do not need me;
Out of the world’s abyss,
Like a shell without pearls,
I am cast on your shores.
Indifferently, you stir the waves
And immitigably sing;
But you shall love and cherish
This equivocal, unnecessary shell.
You shall lie down on the sand close by,
Apparelled in your raiment,
And bind to the shell
The colossal bell of the billows.
And your whispering spray shall fill,
With wind and rain and mist,
The walls of the brittle shell –
A heart where nobody dwells …
(26) 1911
I hate the light
Of the monotonous stars.
Salutations to you, my ancient delirium –
Altitude of an arrowed tower!
Be lace, stone,
Become a cobweb:
Lacerate the void
With a fine needle.
My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.
Yes – but where will the shaft
Of living thought fly?
My time and journey over,
Perhaps I shall return:
I couldn’t love there;
Here – I’m afraid to …
(29) 1912
In the haze your image
Trembled; it troubled
And eluded me: mistakenly
I said, ‘Good God!’
The name of the Lord – a large bird –
Flew from my breast.
In front: a swirl of mist.
Behind: the empty cage.
(30) 1912
No, not the moon, but a bright clock-face
Shines on me. Am I to blame
If the feeble stars strike me as milky?
And I loathe Batyushkov’s conceit:
When asked the time,
His answer was – Eternity.
(31) 1912
The traveller
I am overcome by dread
In the face of mysterious heights;
I’m satisfied by a swallow in the sky
And I love the way a bell-tower soars!
I feel I am the age-old traveller
Who, on bending planks, above the abyss,
Listens to the snowball grow
And eternity strike on stone clocks.
If it could be! But I am not that wayfarer
Flickering against faded leaves:
True sadness sings in me.
There’s an avalanche in the hills!
And all my self is in the bells,
Though music cannot save one from the abyss!
(32) 1912
The casino
I’m not in favour of premeditated happiness:
Sometimes nature is a grey blemish
And I’m sentenced, slightly tipsy,
To taste the colours of impoverishment.
The wind is playing with a tousled cloud,
The anchor scrapes the ocean bottom;
My mind, lifeless as linen,
Hangs over nothingness.
But I like the casino on the dunes:
The vast view from the misty window,
A thin ray of light on the crumpled tablecloth;
And, with greeny water all around,
When, like a rose, the wine is in its glass,
I like to follow the sea-gull’s wings!
(33) 1912
The Lutheran
On a walk I came across a funeral
Near the Lutheran church, last Sunday.
An absentminded passer-by, I stopped to watch
The rigorous distress on the faces of the flock.
I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking,
And nothing shone except fine brass
And reflections from the lazy horse-shoes
On the toneless Sunday side-roads.
In the resilient half-light of the carriage
Where sadness, the dissembler, lay entombed,
Wordless and tearless and chary of greetings
A buttonhole of autumn roses gleamed.
The foreigners stretched out in a black ribbon
And weeping ladies went on foot,
Red faces veiled; while, above them,
Nothing stopped the stubborn coachman.
Whoever you were, Lutheran deceased,
They buried you with ease and artlessness,
Eyes were dimmed with the decency of tears,
Bells rang out with dignified restraint.
I thought – no need for speeches:
We are not prophets nor precursors,
We do not delight in heaven nor live in fear of hell,
In dull noon we burn like candles.
(37) 1912
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia – here the Lord commanded
That nations and tsars should halt!
Your dome, according to an eye-witness,
Hangs from heaven as though by a chain.
All centuries take their measure from Justinian:
Out of her shrine, in Ephesus, Diana allowed
One hundred and seven green marble pillars
To be pillaged for his alien gods.
How did your lavish builder feel
When – with lofty hand and soul –
He set the apses and the chapels,
Arranging them at east and west?
A splendid temple, bathing in the peace –
A festival of light from forty windows;
Under the dome, on pendentives, the four Archangels
Sail onwards, most beautiful of all.
And this sage and spherical building
Shall outlive centuries and nations,
And the resonant sobbing of the seraphim
Shall not warp the dark gilt surfaces.
(38) 1912
Notre Dame
Where a Roman judged a foreign people
A basilica stands and, first and joyful
Like Adam once, an arch plays with its own ribs:
Groined, muscular, never unnerved.
From outside, the bones betray the plan:
Here flying buttresses ensure
That cumbersome mass shan’t crush the walls –
A vault bold as a battering-ram is idle.
Elemental labyrinth, unfathomable forest,
The Gothic soul’s rational abyss,
Egyptian power and Christian shyness,
Oak together with reed – and perpendicular as tsar.
But the more attentively I studied,
Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold,
The more I thought: I too one day shall create
Beauty from cruel weight.
(39) 1912
Poisoned bread, satiated air,
Wounds impossible to bind.
Joseph, sold into Egypt, couldn’t have pined
With a deeper despair!
Bedouin, under the starry sky,
Each on a horse,
Shut their eyes and improvise
Out of the troubles of the day gone by.
Images lie close at hand:
Someone traded a horse,
Somebody else lost his quiver in the sand.
The hazy happenings disperse.
And if truly sung,
Wholeheartedly, at last
Everything vanishes, nothing is left
But space, and stars, and singer.
(54) 1913
Horses’ hooves … The clatter
Of crude and simple times.
And the yardmen, in their sheepskin coats,
Sleep on the wooden benches.
A clamour at the iron gates
Wakes the royally lazy doorman,
Whose wolfish yawning
Recalls the Scythians
When Ovid, with senile love,
Blended Rome and snow,
And sang of the ox- and bullock-waggons
In the march of the barbarians.
(60) 1914
There are orioles in the woods, and length of vowels
Is the sole measure in accentual verse.
But only once a year is nature lengthily protracted
And overflowing, as in Homer’s measure.
This day yawns like a caesura:
Quiet since morning, and arduous duration;
Oxen at pasture, and a golden indolence
To extract from the reed one whole note’s richness.
(62) 1914
Nature is Roman, and mirrored in Rome.
We see its forms of civic grandeur
In transparent air, like a sky-blue circus,
In the forum of fields, in the colonnades of trees.
Nature is Roman, and it seems
Pointless to trouble any gods again:
There are sacrificial entrails to foretell war,
Slaves to keep silence, stones to build!
(65) 1914
Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails.
I have counted half the catalogue of ships:
That caravan of cranes, that expansive host,
Which once rose above Hellas.
Like a wedge of cranes towards alien shores –
On the kings’ heads godlike spray –
Where are you sailing? Without Helen
What could Troy mean to you, Achaean men?
Both the sea and Homer – all is moved by love.
To whom shall I listen? Now Homer falls silent,
And a black sea, thunderous orator,
Breaks on my pillow with a roar.
(78) 1915
Herds of horses gaily neigh or graze,
The valley rusts like Rome;
Time’s translucent rapids wash away
A classical Spring’s dry gold.
In Autumn as I tread the oak-leaves,
Thickly scattered on deserted paths,
I shall remember Caesar’s lovely profile:
Effeminate features, treacherous hook-nose.
Now Capitol and Forum are far away,
Nature is quietly fading;
Even on the earth’s rim I hear
The age of Augustus roll, a majestic orb.
When I am old may my sadness gleam.
I was born in Rome; it has come back to me;
Kind Autumn was my she-wolf
And August – month of the Caesars – smiled on me.
(80) 1915
UNPUBLISHED IN THE STRUVE/FILIPPOV EDITIONS
Newly reaped ears
Lie in level rows;
Fingertips tremble, pressed against
Fingers fragile as themselves.
1909
TWO POEMS FIRST PUBLISHED BY STRUVE/FILIPPOV, 1964
The hunters have trapped you:
Stag, the forests shall mourn!
You can have my black coat, sun,
But preserve my living power!
(165) 1913
The old men of Euripides, an abject throng,
Shamble out like sheep.
I slither like a snake,
In my heart – dark injury.
But it will not be long
Before I shake off sadness,
Like a boy in the evening
Shaking sand from his sandals.
(178) 1914
FROM
TRISTIA
(1922)
– How the splendour of these veils and of this dress
Weighs me down in my disgrace!
– In stony Troezen there shall be
A notorious disaster,
The royal stairs
Shall redden with shame
…
…
And a black sun rise
For the amorous mother.
– Oh if it were hatred seething in my breast, –
But, you see, the confession burst from my own lips.
– In broad daylight Phaedra burns
With a black flame.
In broad daylight
A funeral taper smoulders.
Hippolytus, beware of your mother:
Phaedra – the night – stalks you
In broad daylight.
– With my black love I have sullied the sun …
…
– We are afraid, we do not dare
To succour the imperial grief.
Stung by Theseus, night fell on him.
We shall bring the dead home with our burial chant;
We shall cool the black sun
Of its savage, insomniac passion.
(82) 1916
We shall die in transparent Petropolis,
Where Proserpina rules over us.
We drink the deadly air with every breath,
And every hour is the anniversary of our death.
Goddess of the sea, dread Athena,
Remove your mighty helmet of stone.
We shall die in transparent Petropolis:
Here Proserpina is tsar, not you.
(89) 1916
This night is irredeemable.
Where you are, it is still light.
At Jerusalem’s gates
A black sun has risen.
The yellow sun is more terrible –
Hush-a-bye, baby.
Jews in the bright temple
Buried my mother.
Bereft of priests, devoid of grace,
Jews in the bright temple
Sang the service
Over this woman’s ashes.
The voice of Israelites rang out
Over my mother.
I woke in a radiant cradle,
Lit by a black sun.
(91) 1916
Disbelieving the miracle of resurrection,
We wandered through the cemetery.
– You know, the earth everywhere
Reminds me of those hills
…
…
Where Russia stops abruptly
Above the black and deafly roaring sea.
From these monastic slopes
An ample field runs down.
As it was I didn’t want to travel south
Away from spacious Vladimir,
But to stay there with that occluded nun
In the dark wooden village of god’s fools
Would have spelled disaster.
I kiss your sunburnt elbow
And a wax-like patch of forehead –
Still white, I know,
Under a strand of dark-complexioned gold.
I kiss your wrist whose turquoise bracelet
Leaves a band of white:
Here, in Tauris, ardent summers
Work their wonders.
How quickly you went dark
And came to the Redeemer’s meagre icon
And couldn’t be torn away from kissing –
You who in Moscow had been so proud.
For us only a name remains,
A miraculous sound for a long time to come.
Take from me these grains of sand:
I’m pouring them from hand to hand.
(90) 1916
Out of the bottle the stream of golden honey poured so slowly
That she had time to murmur (she who had invited us):
Here, in sad Tauris, where fate has led us,
We shan’t be bored. – She glanced over her shoulder.
Everywhere the rites of Bacchus, as if the world were only
Watchmen, dogs; you’ll not meet anyone:
Like heavy barrels the peaceful days roll on;
Far-off voices in a hut – you neither understand them nor reply.
After tea we came into the great brown garden,
Dark blinds lowered like eyelids on the windows,
Past white columns to see the grapes
Where airy glass has sluiced the sleepy mountain.
The vine, I said, lives on like ancient battles –
Leafy-headed horsemen fight in flowery flourishes:
The science of Hellas in stony Tauris – and here are
The noble golden acres, the rusty furrows.
Well, in the white room silence stands like a spinning-wheel.
It smells of vinegar and paint and the cellar’s new wine.
Do you remember, in the Grecian house, the wife dear to all
(Not Helen – another) – how long she spent weaving?
Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?
The whole journey a thundering of the sea’s weighty waves.
And leaving his ship, canvas worn out on the seas,
Odysseus came back, filled with time and space.
(92) 1917
Spring’s transparent-grey asphodels
Are still far away.
For a while yet sand rustles,
Waves seethe.
But here my spirit, like Persephone,
Enters the insubstantial circle,
And in the kingdom of the dead
Delightful sunburnt arms don’t exist.
Why do we entrust to a boat
The weight of a funeral urn,
And celebrate the black rose festival
On amethyst-coloured water?
My spirit aspires there,
Beyond the misty headland of Meganom,
And a black sail shall come back from there
After the burial!
A shadowy column of storm-clouds
Quickly passes,
Under a wind-driven moon
Black rose-flakes scurry.
And memory’s huge flag –
Bird of death and mourners –
Trails its black borders
Over the cypress stern.
And the sad fan of years gone by
Opens with a rustling sigh
Where the amulet was darkly buried
With a shudder in the sand.
My spirit aspires there,
Beyond the misty headland of Meganom,
And a black sail shall come back from there
After the burial!
(93) 1917
Tristia
I have studied the science of separations
From nocturnal laments when hair flows loose.
Oxen chew, waiting lengthens,
This last hour of vigil in the city.
And I honour the rituals of that cock-crowing night
When, having lifted the journey’s burden of grief,
Tear-stained eyes gazed into the distance
And the singing of Muses blended with the weeping of women.
Who can know from the word goodbye
What kind of parting is in store for us,
What the cock’s clamour promises
When a light burns in the acropolis,
And at the dawn of some sort of new life
When the lazy ox chews in his stall
Why the rooster, herald of new life,
Flaps his wings on the city walls?
And I like the way of weaving:
The shuttle runs, the spindle hums,
And – flying to meet us like swan’s down –
Look, barefooted Delia!
Oh how meagre life’s weft,
How threadbare the language of rejoicing!
Everything existed of old, everything happens again,
And only the moment of recognition is sweet.
So be it: a translucent shape
Like a squirrel’s pelt
Lies on a clean clay dish
And a girl stares, bent over the wax.
Not for us to foretell the Grecian Erebus;
Wax is for women what bronze is for men.
On us our fate falls only in battles;
Their death is given in divination.
(104) 1918
Sisters: heaviness and tenderness bear the same insignia.
Wasps too suck the lungwort heavy as a rose.
Man dies, the hot sand cools.
Yesterday’s sun is borne on a black litter.
Oh, heaviness of honeycombs, tenderness of nets:
It is easier to raise a rock than to say your name!
I am left with one care only, a golden one:
To free myself from the burden of time.
I drink the turbid air as if it were dark water.
Time is turned by the plough, and the rose was earth.
The heavy-tender roses, in their slow whirlpool,
Are plaited into double wreaths.
(108) 1920
Return to the incestuous lap,
Leah, from which you came:
Instead of Ilium’s sun
You chose a yellow twilight.
Go, no one shall touch you.
On the father’s breast, at dead of night,
Let the incestuous daughter
Bury her head.
But a fateful change
Must be fulfilled in you:
You shall be called Leah – not Helen –,
Not because imperial blood
Flows heavier in those veins
Than in your veins.
No, you shall fall in love with a Jew
And dissolve in him. God help you.
(109) 1920
When Psyche – life – descends among shades,
Pursuing Persephone through half-transparent leaves,
The blind swallow hurls itself at her feet
With Stygian affection and a green twig.
Phantoms quickly throng around their new companion,
They meet the fugitive with grievings,
In her face they wring weak hands,
Perplexed by bashful hope.
One holds out a mirror, another a phial of perfumes –
The soul likes trinkets, is after all feminine.
And dry complainings, like fine rain,
Sprinkle the leafless forest with transparent voices.
And uncertain what to do in this tender hubbub
The soul doesn’t recognize the transparent trees.
Psyche breathes on the mirror, slow to hand over
The lozenge of copper to the master of the ferry.
(112) 1920
I have forgotten the word I wanted to say.
On severed wings, to play with the transparent ones,
The blind swallow flies back to her palace of shadows;
A nocturnal song is sung in a frenzy.
No birds are heard. No blossom on the immortelle.
The manes of the night horses are transparent.
An empty boat floats on an arid estuary
And, lost among grasshoppers, the word swoons.
The word slowly grows, like a tent or shrine,
Now throws itself down like demented Antigone,
Now like a dead swallow falls at one’s feet,
With Stygian affection and a green twig.
Oh, to bring back the shyness of clairvoyant fingers,
Recognition’s rounded happiness!
I am so afraid of the sobbing of the Muses,
Of mist, of bells, of brokenness.
They who are going to die can love and see,
Even sound can pour into their fingers,
But I have forgotten what I wanted to say
And a thought without flesh flies back to its palace of shadows.
The transparent one keeps on repeating the wrong thing:
Always swallow, my love, Antigone …
And on my lips the black ice burns,
The recollection of Stygian bells.
(113) 1920
For the sake of delight
Take from my hands some sun and some honey,
As Persephone’s bees enjoined on us.
Not to be untied, the unmoored boat;
Not to be heard, fur-shod shadows;
Not to be silenced, life’s thick terrors.
Now we have only kisses,
Like little furry bees,
Which perish when they fly from the hive.
They rustle in transparent thickets
In the dense night forest of Taigetos,
Nourished by time, by honeysuckle and mint.
For the sake of delight, then, take my uncouth present:
This simple necklace of dead dried bees
That turned honey into sun.
(116) 1920
Here is the pyx, like a golden sun,
For a splendid moment hanging in the air;
Now only the Greek tongue should resound,
Holding the whole world in its hands like an apple.
The exultant zenith of the service has come round,
Light under the dome inside the circular temple in July,
So that with nothing held back we sigh, beyond time,
For that green pasture where time stands still.
And the Eucharist hovers like an eternal midday –
All partake, play and sing;
Under the eyes of everyone the holy vessel pours
With inexhaustible rejoicing.
(117) 1920
Because I had to let go of your arms,
Because I betrayed your salty tender lips,
I must wait for dawn in the dense acropolis.
How I abhor these weeping ancient timbers!
Achaean men fit out the Horse in the dark,
They hack into the walls with their toothed saws,
Nothing can quiet the blood’s dry murmur,
And you have no name, no sound, no copy.
How could I think you would come back, how could I dare?
Why did I break with you before it was time?
The gloom hasn’t lightened and the cock hasn’t crowed,
The hot axe hasn’t yet split the wood.
The walls ooze resin like a transparent tear,
The town feels its wooden ribs,
But blood has rushed to the ladders and taken it by storm,
The men have been enticed three times in dreams.
Where is dear Troy? Where the imperial, where the maidenly house?
Priam’s lofty starling-coop shall be a ruin.
And arrows fall like dry, wooden rain
And other arrows grow from the ground like hazel-nut trees.
The last star-pricks are dying out painlessly,
As morning, a grey swallow, raps at the window.
And lethargic day, like an ox waking in straw,
Stirs on the streets, tousled by long sleep.
(119) 1920
When the city moon looks out on the streets,
And slowly lights the impenetrable town,
And darkness swells, full of melancholy and bronze,
And songs of wax are smashed by the harshness of time;
And the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower,
And the ashen woman descends to reap the dead world,
Quietly scattering huge spokes of shadow,
And strews yellowing straw across the floorboards …
(121) 1920
When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped
Into the ring of dancing shadows
Stamping on the tender meadow,
A mist of sound was left of what had melted.
To begin with I thought the name was ‘seraph’
And I fought shy of such a light body,
A few days passed and I blended with it
And dissolved into that dear shadow.
And again from the apple-tree wild fruit falls,
And the secret form flickers in front of me,
Blaspheming and cursing itself
And swallowing jealousy’s hot coals.
Then happiness rolls by like a golden hoop
Fulfilling someone else’s will,
And cutting the air with the palm of your hand
You chase the sweetness of Spring.
And it is so arranged that we do not dance away
From these spell-bound circles.
The expansive hills of virginal earth
Lie swaddled away.
(123) 1920
I like the grey silences under the arches:
Public prayer, funeral processions,
The affecting obligatory rites and requiems at Saint Isaac’s.
I like the priest’s unhurried step,
The winding-sheet’s expansive bodying-forth,
Lent’s Galilean gloom, like an ancient fishing-net,
And smoke of the Old Testament on glowing altars,
And the priest’s orphaned cry. And royal meekness:
Unsullied snow on shoulders, wild purple vestments.
Hagia Sophia and Saint Peter’s – everlasting barns of air and light,
Storehouses of universal goods,
Granaries of the New Testament.
Not to either of you is the spirit drawn in years of grave disaster:
Here, up the wide and sullen steps,
The wolves of tribulation slink; we’ll never betray their tracks:
For the slave is free, having overcome fear,
And in cool granaries, in deep bins,
The grain of whole and perfect faith is stored.
(124) 1921
FROM
POEMS
(1928)
I was washing at night in the courtyard,
Harsh stars shone in the sky.
Starlight, like salt on an axe-head –
The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure
Than truth’s clean canvas.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
(126) 1921
To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch,
To some, a fragrant wine with cinnamon,
Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars
To carry back to smoke-filled huts.
A little still-warm chicken dung,
Sheep’s muddle-headed warmth:
For life, I would give everything –
For so-much-needed care, for a match to warm me.
Look: in my hand there’s only an earthenware bowl;
A chirping of stars is tickling my thin ear;
Through this pitiful down I have to admire
The yellowness of grass and the warmth of the soil.
Quietly to be carding wool and tedding straw;
To starve like an apple-tree in its winter binding;
Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;
Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.
Let the conspirators, like sheep, speed over the snow.
Let the brittle snow-crust crack.
Winter – to some – is a lodging of wormwood and acrid smoke,
To some the stern salt of ceremonial wounds.
Oh to raise a lantern on a long stick,
Under the salt of stars to follow a dog,
And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard.
But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.
(127) 1922
Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips,
The bull furiously paws at the green breakers;
A ladies’ man, no oarsman, he snorts,
His spine unused to its laborious burden.
An occasional dolphin leaps in an arc,
A sea-urchin comes into view. Hold in your arms,
Tender Europa, all his worldly possessions:
Where could a bull find a more desirable yoke?
Bitterly she heeds the mighty splashing:
The corpulent and fertile sea is seething.
Aghast at the water’s oily brilliance,
She would like to slide down those hirsute cliffs.
Ah, she would prefer the company of sheep,
The creak of rowlocks or the lap of a spacious deck,
And fish flickering beyond a lofty poop. –
But the oarless oarsman swims with her further and further!
(128) 1922
As the leaven swells,
So the housewife’s thrifty soul
Is possessed by the heat of the loaves,
As if Sophias of bread
Raise cupolas of rounded ardour
From a table of cherubim
And to coax a miraculous surplus
With force or caresses, the kingly herd-boy –
Time – seizes the bread, the word.
Even the stale stepson of the centuries
Finds his place – as the cooling makeweight
For loaves already lifted from the oven.
(130) 1922
I climbed into the tousled hayloft,
Breathed the hay-dust of the mouldering stars,
The dishevelment of space,
And on the ladder pondered: why
Wake up a swarm of sounds, the miracle of Aeolian order,
Athwart this everlasting squabble?
Once more I want to strike a match,
To shove the night with my shoulder –
To wake it up.
The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,
The hayloft’s ancient chaos
Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.
Mowers bring back
Goldfinches fallen from their nests.
I shall wring loose from these burning lines,
Get back to the order of sound where I belong,
To the blood’s grass-like and ringing connection,
Nerving myself for the dream beyond reason.
(from 131 and 132) 1922
My time
My time, my brute, who will be able
To look you in the eyes
And glue together with his blood
The backbones of two centuries?
Blood, the builder, gushes
From the earth’s throat.
Only parasites tremble
On the edge of the future …
To wrench our age out of prison
A flute is needed
To connect the sections
Of disarticulated days …
And buds shall swell again,
Shoots splash out greenly.
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful century.
With an idiot’s harsh and feeble grin
You look behind:
A beast, once supple,
Ponders its paw-marks in the sand.
(from 135) 1923
Whoever finds a horseshoe
We look at a forest and say:
Here is a forest for ships and masts,
Red pines,
Free to their tops of their shaggy burden,
To creak in the storm
In the furious forestless air;
The plumbline fastened to the dancing deck
Will hold out under the wind’s salt heel.
And the sea-wanderer,
In his unbridled thirst for space,
Dragging through damp ruts a geometer’s needle,
Collates the rough surface of the seas
With the attraction of the earth’s lap.
But breathing the smell
Of resinous tears oozing through planks,
Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted
Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter but by that other –
Father of journeys, friend of seafarers –
We say:
These too stood on the earth,
Awkward as a donkey’s backbone,
Their crests forgetful of their roots,
On a celebrated mountain ridge;
And howled under the sweet cloud-burst,
Fruitlessly offering the sky their precious freight
For a pinch of salt.
Where shall we begin?
Everything pitches and splits,
The air quivers with comparisons,
No one word is better than another,
The earth hums with metaphors.
And light two-wheeled chariots,
Harnessed brightly to flocks of strenuous birds,
Explode,
Vying with the snorting favourites of the race-track.
Three times blest he who puts a name into song;
A song adorned with a name
Survives longer among the others,
Marked by a fillet
That frees it from forgetfulness and stupefying smells,
Whether proximity of man or the smell of a beast’s pelt
Or simply a whiff of thyme rubbed between the palms.
The air dark like water, everything alive swims like fish,
Fins pushing aside the sphere
That’s compact, resilient, hardly heated –
The crystal in which wheels move and horses shy,
The moist black-earth every night flung open anew
By pitchforks, tridents, hoes and ploughs.
The air is mixed as densely as the earth –
You can’t get out, to get inside is arduous.
Rustling runs through the trees like a green ball-game;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.
Let us be grateful for what we had:
I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.
The era rang like a golden sphere,
Cast, hollow, supported by no one.
Touched, it answered yes and no,
As a child will say:
I’ll give you an apple, or: I won’t give you one;
Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.
The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased.
The horse foams in the dust.
But the acute curve of his neck
Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs
When there were not four
But as many as the stones on the road,
Renewed in four shifts
As blazing hooves pushed off from the ground.
So,
Whoever finds a horseshoe
Blows away the dust,
Rubs it with wool till it shines,
Then
Hangs it over the threshold
To rest,
So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint.
Human lips
which have nothing more to say
Preserve the form of the last word said.
And the arm retains the sense of weight
Though the jug
splashes half-empty
on the way home.
What I am saying at this moment is not being said by me
But is dug from the ground like grains of petrified wheat.
Some
on their coins depict a lion,
Others
a head;
Various tablets of brass, of gold and bronze
Lie with equal honour in the earth.
The century, trying to bite through them, left its teeth-marks there.
Time pares me down like a coin,
And there is no longer enough of me for myself.
(136) 1923
1 January 1924
Whoever has been kissing time’s tortured crown
Shall recall later, with filial tenderness,
How time lay down to sleep
In the snowdrift of wheat beyond the window.
Whoever lifted the sick eyelids of the age –
Two vast and sleepy eye-balls –
Hears everlastingly the roaring of the rivers
Of false and desolate times.
The potentate-era has orbs like sleepy apples
And a lovely earthenware mouth.
But it shall fall, expiring
On the overwhelmed arm of its ageing son.
I know life’s exhalations weaken everyday:
A little more, and the simple songs of palpable injury
Will have been cut short,
Lips sealed with tin.
An earthenware life! A dying era!
What I dread is this: that you will be understood
Only by someone whose smile is helpless,
By someone who is lost.
What anguish – to search for a lost word,
To lift sick eyelids,
And with lime-corroded blood
Gather night grasses for an alien tribe.
What an era: layers of lime in the sick son’s blood
Harden; Moscow sleeps, like a wooden box,
And there’s nowhere to run to from the tyrant-epoch …
Snow, as of old, smells of apples.
I want to escape from my own threshold.
Where to? The street is dark
And conscience shows up ahead of me, white,
Like salt scattered for pavements.
How could I ever betray to scandalmongers –
Again the frost smells of apples –
That marvellous pledge to the Fourth Estate
And vows solemn enough for tears?
Who else shall you kill? Who else extol?
What lie invent?
The Underwood’s cartilage – quick, wrench out its key
And you’ll find the little bone of a pike;
And, layers of lime thawing in the sick son’s blood,
Blissful laughter shall splash out …
But the typewriters’ mere sonatina
Is only a shadow of former, mighty sonatas.
(from 140) 1924
TWO POEMS PUBLISHED IN
NOVY MIR,
(1931 AND 1932)
Armenia
(3)
Armenia, you call for colours –
And with his paw a lion
Seizes half a dozen crayons from a pencil-box.
Here the women pass,
Stark as children’s drawings.
They bestow their splendour,
Their lionesque beauty,
And do not terrorize the blood.
(4)
I’ve drooled over my dishevelled life, like a mullah over his Koran;
I’ve frozen time and haven’t spilt hot blood …
(7)
Majesty of clamorous boulders –
Armenia! Armenia!
Summoning raucous hills to war –
Armenia! Armenia!
Unendingly journeying towards the silver trumpets of Asia –
Armenia! Armenia!
Lavishly scattering the Persian coins of the sun –
Armenia! Armenia!
(13)
Earthenware, azure … azure, clay …
What more is needed? Squint quickly,
Like a myopic shah, over a turquoise ring,
Over earth’s mould, whose script and lexicon are ringing,
A festering text, a costly clay,
By which we are tormented, stirred,
As by music and the word.
(from parts 3, 4, 7 and 13 of 203–15) 1930
Batyushkov
Palaver of the waves …
Harmony of tears …
The bell of brotherhood …
Mumbling, you bring us
The grape flesh, poetry,
To refresh the palate.
Pour your eternal dreams, samples of blood,
From one glass to another.
(from 261) 1932
POEMS PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY
Self-portrait
In the raised head, a hint of wing –
But the coat is flapping;
In the closed eyes, in the peace
Of the arms: energy’s pure hiding-place.
Here is a creature that can fly and sing,
The word malleable and flaming,
And congenital awkwardness is overcome
By inborn rhythm!
(164) 1931
I was only in a childish way connected with the established order:
I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;
And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,
However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.
I never stood under the Egyptian portico of a bank
With ponderous importance, frowning, in a beaver-fur mitre,
And above the lemon-coloured Neva
No gypsy girl ever danced for me to the crackle of hundred-rouble notes.
Sensing future executions, from the howl of stormy events
I ran to the Black Sea nymphs,
And from the beauties of that time – from those tender European ladies –
How much confusion, strain and grief I embraced!
Why does this city still retain
Its ancient rights over my thoughts and feelings?
Fire and frost have made it more insolent:
Self-satisfied, doomed, frivolous, youthful!
Perhaps it’s because I saw in a picture-book
Lady Godiva with her ginger mane hanging down
That I still secretly repeat to myself: Lady Godiva,
Goodbye … But I don’t remember now …
(222) Leningrad, 1931
Help me, O Lord, to get through this night:
I am afraid for her life, your handmaiden’s. –
Living in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.
(223) 1931
For the resounding glory of eras to come,
For their sublime stock of people,
I was deprived of the cup at the elders’ feast
And my happiness and honour.
Our epoch’s wolf-hound grips my back
Though my blood is not wolf’s blood;
Squeeze me, rather, like a hat up the sleeve
Of the Siberian-steppe-fur-coat,
In case I see any trembling or mire
Or blood-splashed bones on the rack,
So for me blue polar foxes may shine
All night in their original beauty.
Take me into the night where the Yenisey flows
And the pine-tree reaches the stars,
Because my blood is not wolf’s blood
And only an equal shall kill me.
(227) 1931
I drink to the blossoming epaulette,
To all I’m reproached for and won’t forget:
Asthma and lordly fur-coat,
The bile of the Petersburg climate,
The singing pines of Savoy,
The jug of cream – Alpine joy,
And the oil paintings in Paris. I also rejoice
At roses in the Rolls-Royce,
Champs-Elysées benzine,
Proud English red-heads, quinine.
To the waves of Biscay! I drink, but what with I’m not sure:
The Pope’s Châteauneuf, a happy Spumante, or …?
(233) 1932
Impressionism
The painter portrayed for us
Lilac’s violent swoon
And laid on the canvas, like scabs,
Colour’s sonorous gradations.
He knew the density of oil –
Its pastry summer
Baked with violet marrow,
Dilating in its oven.
Even more violet is that shadow there:
A whistling or whip dying like a match,
So that you’d say: chefs in the kitchen
Are preparing plump pigeons.
Veils merely sketched,
A swing you have to guess,
And in this disorder of dusk,
Already a bee keeps house.
(258) 1932
Ariosto
It’s cold in Europe, Italy is dark,
And power barbarous like the hands of Peter the Great.
Oh to throw wide open, as soon as possible,
A vast window on the Adriatic.
And I delight in his frenzied leisure:
Babble of sweet and sour, lovely oyster-sounds –
The whirr of a hundred whips. With a knife
I shrink from exposing such a pearl.
Through his window he smiles at the butcher’s stall:
The child, asleep under a net of blue flies;
The soldiers of the Duke now drunk
On wine and garlic and on plague.
Dear Ariosto, maybe a century shall pass –
And we shall pour your azure and our black together
Into one fraternal, vast, blue-black sea.
We were there too. We too drank mead.
(from 267 and 268) 1933, 1936
We exist, without sensing our country beneath us,
Ten steps away our words evaporate,
But where there are enough for half a conversation
We always commemorate the Kremlin’s man of the mountains.
His fat fingers slimy as worms,
His words dependable as weights of measure.
His cockroach moustache chuckles,
His top-boots gleam.
And around him a riff-raff of scraggy-necked chiefs;
He plays with the lackeydoms of half-men
Who warble, or miaow, or whimper.
He alone prods and probes.
He forges decree after decree like horseshoes:
In the groin, brain, forehead, eye.
Whoever is being executed – there’s raspberry compote
And the gigantic torso of the Georgian.
(286) 1933
- The body of King Arshak is unwashed, his beard runs wild.
- His fingernails are broken, and wood-lice crawl across his face.
- His ears, grown dull with silence, once listened to Greek music.
- His tongue is scabbed from jailer’s food – which once pressed grapes against the palate and was adroit like the tip of a flautist’s tongue.
- The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is sparse as the bleating of a sheep.
- King Shapukh, thinks Arshak, has got the better of me and, worse, has taken my air for himself!
- The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.
- He commands my hair and fingernails. He grows my beard and swallows my spit, so used has he become to the thought that I am to be found here – in the fortress of Aniush.
- The Kushan people rose up against Shapukh.
- They snapped the frontier at an undefended place like a silken thread.
- Like an eyelash in his eye, the attack pricked King Shapukh.
- Both enemies screwed up their eyes, so as not to see each other.
- Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, encouraged the commander of the cavalry from the centre of Shapukh’s army. Darmastat wormed his way into favour, snatched his master, like a chess-piece, out of danger, remaining all the while in public view.
- He had been governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak’s velvet voice gave orders.
- Yesterday Arshak was a king, but today is fallen into a crevice, huddles like a baby in the womb, and warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.
- When the time came for his reward, Darmastat’s request tickled the Assyrian’s keen ears like a feather:
- Give me a pass to the fortress of Aniush. I should like Arshak to spend one more day, full of sounds, taste and smell, as it used to be when he entertained himself at the chase and saw to the planting of trees.
( from 8, ‘Alagez’ of Journey to Armenia) 1933
Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges,
Redden under scourges and to burn in frosts.
Your child-like arms are to lift heavy irons,
To lift heavy irons and to sew mail-bags.
Your tender soles are to walk barefoot on glass,
Barefoot on glass and blood-stained sand.
And I am here to burn for you like a black candle,
Burn like a black candle and not dare to pray.
(296) 1934
Black earth
Over-esteemed, too-black, all in peak condition,
Everything groomed withers, everything aired;
Everything crumbling, coming together like a choir –
Wet clods of my ‘soil and freedom’!
In the days of early ploughing – black, almost blue.
And this is the foundation of unwarlike work –
A thousand mounds of furrowed language:
And something unbounded within these bounds!
And yet the earth is – a blunder, a blunt axe-head;
One cannot implore the earth, even if one falls at its feet:
Still it whets the hearing like a mildewed flute;
It ploughs the ear with a chilly, morning clarinet.
How pleasing fatty topsoil is to ploughshare,
How silent the steppe in its April upheaval!
Well, I wish you well, black earth: be firm, sharp-eyed . .
A black-voiced silence is at work.
(299) April 1935
Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips,
But what I’m going to say every schoolboy shall know by heart:
The earth is at its roundest on Red Square
And its unchained curve is hard,
On Red Square the earth is at its roundest
And its curve, rolling all the way down to the rice fields,
Is unexpectedly expansive
While there are still any slaves on the earth.
(306) May 1935
You took away my seas and running jumps and sky
And propped my foot against the violent earth.
Where could this brilliant calculation get you?
You couldn’t take away my muttering lips.
(307) May 1935
My country conversed with me,
Spoiled me, scolded, didn’t listen.
She only noticed me when,
Grown-up, I became an eye-witness.
Then suddenly, like a lens, she set me on fire
With a beam from the Admiralty spire.
(part 6 of 312) May – June 1935
For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights,
Those breasts enticing the young Goethe,
Let me be answerable, but not lose all my rights.
There is a multifaceted life beyond the law.
(316) June 1935
A wave advances – one wave breaking another’s backbone,
Flinging itself at the moon in slavish yearning.
And a young janissary of a whirlpool –
In its untiring tidal metropolis –
Raves, slant-eyed, digging its ditch in the sand.
But through the flaky gloom
An unbuilt wall’s pale teeth rise up.
The soldiers of suspicious sultans
Fall from foaming stairs – dismembered, spattered.
Cold eunuchs bring the poison in.
(319) July 1935
I shall perform a smoky rite:
In this opal here, in my disgrace,
I see a seaside summer’s strawberries –
Cleft cornelians
And their brothers, agates like ants.
But a pebble from the sea’s depths,
A simple soldier,
Is more dear to me:
Grey, wild,
That no one wants.
(318) July 1935
I shall not return my borrowed dust
To the earth,
Like a white floury butterfly.
I will this thinking body –
This charred, bony flesh,
Alive to its own span –
To turn into a street, a country.
( from 320) 21 July 1935
I can’t make sense of today –
A day somehow yellow-mouthed.
Dock gates stare at me
From anchors and mist.
Through faded water a convoy of battleships
Moves quietly, quietly,
And the narrow pencil-box canals
Look even blacker under ice.
(329) 9–28 December 1936
Like a belated present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like its initial,
Diffident sweep.
Its terror is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the leafless circle.
But precariously more powerful than anything
Is its bulging blueness:
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly …
(336) 29–30 December 1936
I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world …
See, Aeschylus, how I weep as I draw the portrait of the Leader …
In the friendship of his wise eyes
One suddenly sees – a father! …
(His powerful eyes – sternly kind …)
And I want to thank the hills
That nourished this gristle, this wrist.
He was born in the mountains and knew the bitterness of prison …
I want to call him – not Stalin – but Dzhugashvili!
I seem to see him dressed in his greatcoat and his cap,
On the wonderful square, with his happy eyes …
The furrows of his giant plough reach the sun.
He smiles with the smile of the harvester …
( from ‘Lines on Stalin’) 1937
You still haven’t died, you’re still not alone
While – with a beggar-woman for companion –
You delight in the immense plains
And the haze and cold and snow-storms.
In miraculous poverty, opulent privation,
You live alone – consoled, at peace;
These days and nights are hallowed,
Honey-tongued is this innocent labour.
Unhappy any man whom, like his shadow,
A dog’s bark scares and the wind scythes down.
And poor indeed one who, half-alive,
Begs mercy of a shadow.
(354) 15–16 January 1937
I look the frost in the face, alone –
It’s going nowhere, I come from nowhere –
And always the breathing wonder of the plain
Ironed, folded without a crease.
The sun is squinting in laundered destitution,
Its frown peaceful and consoled,
The multitude of forests much the same …
Snow crunches in my eyes, innocent as bread.
(349) 16 January 1937
Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes –
I’m sick of them! And the horizon,
Catching its breath, is flung wide-open.
I need a blindfold for both eyes!
I could better have endured the sand
In layers along the banks of the toothy Kama.
I would have clung to its shy sleeves,
Its ripples, brinks and hollows.
We would have worked in harmony – for a century or second.
Envious of the rapids’ precipitation,
I would have listened under the flowing timber’s bark
To the movement of the fibrous rings.
(351) 16 January 1937
Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger,
What can we do with the murderous plains?
Surely what we deem to be their openness
We ourselves – falling asleep – behold;
And everywhere the questions swell – where do they go,
And where do they come from?
And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep
Slowly crawling across them –
The space for Judases not yet born.
(350) 16 January 1937
Don’t compare: anyone alive is matchless.
I yielded, with a kind of tender terror,
To the flatness of the plains,
And the circle of the sky made me ill.
I appealed to the air, my servant,
Waiting for service or news;
I prepared for a journey, swam along the arc
Of voyages that would never start.
I’m ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.
(352) 18 January 1937
What has contended with oxide and alloys
Burns like feminine silver,
And quiet work silvers the iron
Of the plough, the voice of the poet.
(353) 1937
The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance,
I dwindle there, no longer noticed,
But in caressing books, in children’s games,
I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!
(341) 1937
Listening, listening to the early ice
Rustling below the bridges,
I remember being luminously tipsy –
Head swimming, going under.
From callous stairways, areas of awkward palaces
On the edges of his Florence,
Alighieri sang more forcefully
From tired lips.
So too my shadow picks
At the grain of the granite,
Eyeing in the dark a row of hulks
That seemed houses in the light,
Or twiddles its thumbs
And yawns with us,
Or kicks up a row,
Warmed by other people’s wine and sky,
And feeds stale loaves
To the importunate swans …
(358) 22 January 1937
A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp,
Lord and master of his sledge,
Careers across the steaming ice
And I – at odds with the obedient world – rejoice
In this contagion of toboggans,
Amazed by children swooping down:
Steep slopes, silver runners, frosty exhalations.
Oh that our era might slide for ever,
Soundless as squirrels, towards a soft river.
( from 359) 24 January 1937
Where can I put myself this January?
Exposed, the town is extravagantly stubborn …
Have I got drunk on doors that lock me out? –
All the catches and fastenings make me want to bellow.
And yapping alleys stretched like stockings,
Streets tangled as an attic,
And cornered creatures crawling into corners
And scuttling out on the sly.
And I slither into a pit, into the warty dark,
Towards the iced-up pump-house,
And, stumbling, munch dead air,
And the feverish rooks rise up.
And I gasp after them, yelling
At some frozen wood-pile:
Just a reader, someone to speak with, a doctor!
A conversation on the bitter stairs!
(360) February 1937
Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark,
I’ve gone into the depths of time –
And found it numb.
But one rib of mine is a burning spike
Which isn’t guarded by these watching phantoms,
Nor by this sentry asleep under the storm.
Forgive me, magnificent brother, and master,
And father of the black-green darkness …
Like a boy following grown-ups into wrinkled water
I seem to be walking towards a future,
But it seems I shall never see it,
Now that our tribe is troubled by a shadow,
Twilight’s intoxications, hollow years.
( from 265 and 364) Summer 1931 and 4 February 1937
Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue,
And the slow sail continued as a cloud –
I’m parted from you, scarcely having known your worth.
Longer than organ fugues and bitter is the twisted seaweed,
Smelling of long-contracted falsities.
My head is tipsy with the tenderness of iron
And rust gnawing gently at the sloping shore …
Why does another sand lie under my head?
You – guttural Urals, muscular Volga,
These steppes – here are all my rights, –
And I must still inhale your air with my entire lungs.
(366) 4 February 1937
I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry,
Sight fairly moist and the mind clear.
Are the grapes in good condition? The wine-skins?
And the stirrings of Colchis in the blood?
But my chest tightens, I’m tongue-tied:
It’s no longer me singing – my breathing sings –,
My ears sheathed in mountains, head hollow.
An unmercenary song is its own reward:
Comfort for friends, for adversaries tar.
A single-eyed song, growing out of moss,
A single-voiced offering chanted on horses, on hills:
In quivering veins their blood is alive –
The hunters imbibe the wine, inhale the air,
Their only task a vexed and generous justice:
Single-mindedly to betroth and bring
The young pair, sinless, to their wedding.
(365) 8 February 1937
Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe –
In the pupil a cuckoo, a drop of dew –
Now barely able to pick out, in full magnitude,
The lonely multitude of stars.
(368) 8–9 February 1937
Armed with the eyesight of narrow wasps
That suck at the axis of the earth,
I smell everything that’s come my way,
Fruitlessly remembering it by heart.
I neither sing, nor draw,
Nor scrape a black-voiced bow across a string:
I only sting life, and love
To envy the energy of subtle wasps.
Oh if only heat of summer, sting of air,
Could – sidestepping sleep and death –
Some day goad me into hearing
The buzz of earth, buzz of the earth.
(367) 8 February 1937
I am plunged into a lion’s den, a fort,
And sinking lower, lower, lower
Under the leavening shower of these sounds:
Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.
How close the advent of your summons:
As keen as commandments of childbirth, of the first-born;
Like a string of pearls from Oceania
And meek baskets of Tahitian women.
Motherland of chastening songs, approach
With the deep notes of your resonant voice!
The shy-sweet countenance of wealthy daughters,
Primal mother, isn’t worth your little finger.
My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman’s voice.
(370) 12 February 1937
If our enemies take me
And people stop talking to me,
If they confiscate the whole world –
The right to breathe, open doors,
Affirm that existence shall go on
And that the people, like a judge, shall judge,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,
My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,
And in a corner of the ominous dark
I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice
And move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,
Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,
Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,
And in the depths of the unguarded night
The eyes of that unskilled labourer, earth, shall shine
And a flock of flaming years swoop down,
And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.
But on this earth (which shall escape decay)
There to wake up life and reason will be – Stalin.
(372) March 1937
Life’s reticulations loosen, madness looms.
So a ray of light spun by a spider
Scatters ribbed pillars,
The crystal temples of eternity.
A thin beam of light to join them,
The columns of grateful pure lines
Shall gather intimately some time or other,
Like guests with an open countenance.
Only let it be now on earth, and not in heaven,
As in a house full of music. –
If only we don’t scare or wound them –
It would be pleasant to survive.
Forgive me for what I’m telling you;
Quietly, quietly read it back to me.
(from 380) 15 March 1937
This is what I want most of all:
With no one on my track
To soar behind the light
That I couldn’t be farther from;
And for you to shine in that sphere –
There is no other happiness –
And learn from a star
What light could mean.
A star can only be star,
Light can only be light,
Because whispering warms us
And babbling makes us strong.
And I would like to say to you,
My little one, mumbling:
It’s by means of our babbling
That I hand you to the light.
(384) 27 March 1937
This azure island was exalted by its potters –
Green Crete. In the resounding earth
They baked their gift. Do you hear the dolphin fins
Beat underground?
It’s easy to remember the sea
In the clay enraptured by firing;
The cold power of a pot
Cleaves into sea and passion.
Azure island, volatile Crete,
Give me back what is mine – my labour;
From the breasts of the fruitful goddess
Fill the baked vessels.
This was, turned azure, and was sung,
Long before Ulysses,
Before food and drink
Were called ‘my’ and ‘mine’.
Recover and shine again,
Star of ox-eyed heaven,
And fortuity, the flying fish,
And the sea saying yes.
(385) March 1937
As if words were not enough,
The theta and iota of a Greek flute –
Unsculptural, unaccountable –
Matured, laboured, crossed frontiers.
It’s impossible to forsake the flute:
It can’t be stopped with clenched teeth,
It can’t be prodded into speech with the tongue,
It can’t be kneaded with the lips.
The flute player doesn’t know repose –
It seems to him that he’s alone,
That some time or other out of lilac clay
He formed his native sea.
With the urgency of recollecting lips,
With an ambitious, resonant murmur,
He collects the sounds to save them,
Neatly, stingily.
Later we shall not be able to repeat him,
Clods of clay in the sea’s hands,
And when I am filled with the sea
My measure has become disease.
My own lips now lisp,
Plague or murder at the root.
And involuntarily falling, falling,
I diminish the force of the flute.
(387) 7 April 1937
I raise this greenness to my lips,
This sticky promise of leaves,
This breach-of-promise earth:
Mother of maples, of oaks, of snowdrops.
See how I am dazzled, blinded,
Obedient to the lowliest root.
Aren’t they too much splendour for one’s eyes –
The explosions of this park?
Like little balls of mercury, the frogs:
With their croaking they couple into a sphere;
Each twig becomes a branch,
And the air a chimera of milk.
(388) 30 April 1937
With her delightful uneven way of walking,
Limping on the empty earth,
A halting freedom draws her on.
It seems that a clear conjecture lingers in her gait –
Something to do with this Spring weather,
Original mother of the sepulchral dome.
And this shall always be beginning.
There are women who are natives of the sodden earth:
Their every step a hollow sobbing,
Their calling to accompany the risen,
To be first to meet the dead.
And we should trespass to demand caresses of them,
And to part from them is beyond our strength.
But whatever shall be is a promise only.
( from 394) 4 May 1937
Notes
In this rag-bag of notes I’ve set out to refer to and convey as wide a spectrum of information and bibliography as is succinctly possible. As the act of translation is necessarily an act of literary criticism, my own judgements, knowledge and ignorance are mainly embodied in my renderings.
Numbers are those of the Struve/Filippov edition, given after each poem. O.M. – Osip Mandelshtam; N.
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