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Osip Mandelshtam SELECTED POEMS ^{Selected and Translated} ^{by James Greene} ^{Forewords by Nadezhda Mandelshtam} ^{and Donald Davie} ^{Introduction by Donald Rayfield}

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

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.[1] 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