Selected Poems

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. M. – Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Where references to authors are unspecific, see under Acknowledgements

(at the end of these Notes) for title and publisher.

STONE (1913, 1916, 1923 AND 1928)

Stone, the title of Mandelshtam’s first book of poems, ‘is obviously a prosaic symbol, yet timeless and in a way sacred – the material of which streets and cathedrals are made’ (N. A. Nilsson, Scando-Slavica IX).

(14) ‘The poem begins with a literally pregnant silence’ (R. F. Holmes, private communication).

Peter France (Poets of Modern Russia): ‘“primordial speechlessness”, the undifferentiated world which precedes poetry and human culture and whose image is the sea’.

V. Terras: ‘O. M.’s nostalgia for primordial unity with the cosmos’ (Slavonic and East European Review XVII, No. 109, 1969).

‘He felt poetry to be immanent in nature, to be there in the silence, a presence with which he could be “fused”… Poetry was not an occasion for sentiment, for “heart”… ’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam). Robert Tracy has pointed out (in his Osip Mandelshtam’s ‘Stone’) that later, in O.M.’s The one who walks, ‘he seems to reply to Silentium: “Though music cannot save one from the abyss”’.

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73) also wrote a celebrated poem called Silentium. (See Charles Tomlinson’s Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev.)

(31) The poet Batyushkov (1787–1855) spent the last thirty or so years of his life in an asylum (from 1821). See also no. 261.

(32) R. F. Holmes has suggested to me that the ‘age-old traveller’ may be Pushkin.

(54) ‘Joseph’: Osip is a Russian version of Joseph.

(60) Ovid was banished to Scythia.

(80) Ovid is speaking.

TRISTIA (1922)

Tristia, the title of O.M.’s second book of poems, ‘is a lament and an encomium for a splendid past, for Renaissance Venice, for Racine’s France, for Hellas, above all for Petropolis… These cultures are seen as one, are fused into one… image of threatened civilisation… The theme of Tristia is summed up in a line of O.M.’s poem about Venice: “How can I escape this festive death?”’ (Robert Chandler, from an unpublished article ‘Mandelstam and Ezra Pound’).

‘In [O.M.’s] poems epochs and cultures that have become deeply stratified in language rise up before our consciousness. An individual word can summon them up…’ (Boris Bukhshtab, Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 1, 1971).

(82) Troezen was where Hippolytus died.

(89) Petropolis ‘was Derzhavin’s and Pushkin’s name for Petersburg… A whole cultural tradition is threatened, dying’. ‘It is not Athena, a goddess noted for her mercifulness and generosity, the goddess of wisdom, who reigns, but Proserpina, queen of the underworld’ (S. Broyde).

(90) Dedicated to Marina Tsvetayeva. I have translated the poem in its original form, as given in Tsvetayeva’s ‘The history of one dedication’ (Oxford Slavonic Papers XI, 1964).

(92) ‘Tauris’: the Crimea.

(93) ‘the image of the “amulet buried in the sand” should be deciphered as “poetry addressed to the reader in posterity”’ (K. Taranovsky).

‘[O.M.’s] visions of classical antiquity are not “Homeric”, “Sapphic”, or “Horatian”, but Mandelshtamian… It is “world culture”, not ancient culture, that is the leitmotif of Mandelshtam’s poetry’ (Victor Terras, ‘Classical Motifs in the Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam’ (Slavic and East European Journal, 3, 1966).

Persephone (or Kore or Proserpina), Queen of the Underworld, spends two-thirds of the year with her mother Demeter (the Greek corn-goddess). ‘This is the “light” part of the annual circle…’ The black sail is ‘still another topos of Greek mythology, known best from the myth of Theseus and Ariadne’ (Victor Terras).

Line 20: ‘Black rose-flakes’ is an allusion to O.M.’s mother’s death (see N.M., Hope Abandoned).

(104) Stanza 1: ‘In the stillness of night a lover pronounces one tender name instead of another, and suddenly realises that this has happened once before: the words and the hair and the cock who has just crowed under the window crowed already in Ovid’s Tristia. And he is overcome by a deep joy of recognition…’ (O.M., ‘The Word and Culture’, in Sobraniye sochineniy).

Line 4: ‘M’s elegy… attains a genuine Latin ring, as Tynyanov observes, by introducing the entirely foreign word vigilia, which changes the chemistry of the whole stanza’ (Henry Gifford, Poetry in a Divided World).

Stanza 3: Clarence Brown refers to ‘the special kind of cognition that takes place when a poet composes a poem. Mandelshtam declares that this is in fact recognition’ (‘Mandelshtam’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, Delos, Austin, Texas, 1968, No. 1).

Compare Fet’s poem which begins: ‘How threadbare our language!’

Line 25 onwards: see Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin V: 4–10. ‘The method [of divination] was to melt a candle into a shallow dish of water, where the suddenly cooled wax would assume odd shapes, like Rorschach blots or… like a cloud or the stretched pelt of a squirrel… Ovid’s parting from his loved ones as he goes into exile is a paradigm of all partings’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam).

‘Erebus’: name of ‘a place of darkness between Earth and Hades’. Erebus is the son of Chaos, brother of Night, and father of Day.

Joseph Brodsky’s version of this poem can be inspected in his Less than One, Viking, 1986, p. 128.

(108) Line 4, according to Akhmatova, refers to the death of Pushkin; according to N.M., to the death of any human being. O.M.: ‘Poetry is the plough which turns up time, so that the deepest layer of time – its black earth – appears on top.’

‘The unspoken “name”, the “golden care” of the second stanza is “love”’(Leon Burnett, The Modern Language Review, April 1981).

(109) Written in the Crimea during the Civil War when O.M. and N.M. were not yet permanently together. ‘Our relationship must have aroused in him a keen awareness of his Jewish roots, a tribal feeling, a sense of kinship with his people – I was the only Jewess in his life. He thought of the Jews as being one family, hence the theme of incest… Leah was the name he had given to a daughter of Lot… One night, thinking about me, he had suddenly seen that I would come to him, as Lot’s daughters had to their father’ (N.M., Hope Abandoned.)

(113) ‘The word grows, bearing a green branch like the dove released from Noah’s ark’ (Lidija Ginzburg, ‘The Poetics of Osip Mandelshtam’, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975).

(116) Bees were sacred to Persephone, ‘her messengers to Man’ (N. A. Nilsson, Mandelshtam: Five Poems).

‘The poetic word, metaphorically transformed into a kiss as a source of joy, is simultaneously a small, hairy bee which… has the orphic power of transmutation’; the necklace ‘is a special artefact, composed of “dead bees”, words which have perished in their normal usage; these “apian” words have reversed the normal process by converting honey into sunlight’ (Tom Stableford, The Literary Appreciation of Russian Writers).

‘The dense night forest of Taigetos’: the high mountain overlooking Sparta, the domain of Artemis and Apollo, where the bees produce ‘not the sweet honey of Hymettos but a honey with… a darker and wilder taste’ (Nilsson).

(119) Line 16: See the Odyssey, Book IV, lines 219–84.

(124) Stanza 4: In a poem written in 1916, Mandelshtam alludes to Rome, Byzantium and Moscow – ‘the three meetings of mankind and Providence… Byzantium had perished and the Grace of God had passed over to Russia’ (K. Taranovsky).

Stanza 6: Henry Gifford (private communication): ‘The slave who has overcome his fear is free – to endure unhappiness…’

POEMS (1928)

‘Mandelshtam’s Poems register a disintegration so absolute that the magnificent tragedy of Tristia is no longer possible, for tragedy presupposes the existence of generally accepted values’ (Robert Chandler).

(127) Stanza 5 – ‘conspirators’: the Soviet edition substitutes ‘dark people’.

(128) ‘Tender Europa’ is N.M.; the poem was written after their marriage.

(135) The question asked in the first stanza is answered in the second: the artist, the creator, can do these things.

O. Ronen refers to Hamlet as one of the subtexts:

(136) ‘this is an ode (Mandelshtam first subtitled it “a Pindaric fragment”), and, typically of the ode, it is concerned with itself, that is to say, with poetry. The world in which poetry must now exist is as turbulent as that of the forest and ship; everything cracks and shakes… The principal image of the poem, the horseshoe itself, is what is left of the stormy animal, now dead… This is human life frozen in its last attitudes, as though surprised in Herculaneum. The speaker himself now speaks in a resurrected voice, turned to stone, and time, the element that erupted… at line 55, finally flows like lava over everything, obliterating the very self of the speaker at the end’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam.)

‘A “poem” is uniquely able to remain intact while all else changes, and hence to contact an unknown future recipient of an expected gift in which is preserved also a part of the poet’ (S. Broyde).

(140) ‘A crucial “New Year”. Lenin is mortally ill…’ (S. Monas, Notes to Complete Poetry of Mandelshtam). O. Ronen’s An Approach to Mandelshtam includes a commentary on this poem: ‘Clay’: Ronen refers to Job (‘Thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again’).

Three and half stanzas are untranslated.

Line 16: Ronen: ‘but the singing lips of the age are sealed…’

Line 21: Ronen: ‘The theme of the forgotten or lost word of no. 113… is reinterpreted here and in other poems of 1921–25 (nos. 130, 131 and 136, etc.) in historical terms: the word becomes the heirloom, passed from one generation to another, or lost in transmission.’

Line 35 – ‘Fourth Estate’: Ronen: ‘not the press, but the razochintsy or classless intelligentsia (to which Mandelshtam felt that he belonged).’

Line 40 – ‘the little bone of a pike’: Ronen: ‘Just as the horseshoe is, in Whoever finds a horseshoe, a talisman against hungry time, so the pike’s bone… becomes… a talisman against… the hungry State.’

Line 42 – ‘Blissful laughter’: ‘the holiday laughter of the Saturnalia…’ etc.

Line 44 – ‘the mighty sonatas’: Ronen points to a passage from Mandelshtam’s prose work The Noise of Time in which Herzen is mentioned, ‘whose stormy political thought will always sound like a Beethoven sonata’.

(261) The original has six four-line stanzas.

POEMS PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY

(222) Lady Godiva: ‘In 1040 Leofric, Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry, imposed certain exactions on his tenants, which his Lady besought him to remove. He said he would do so if she would ride naked through the town’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

(227) My version has benefited from Nabokov’s salutary, scholastic savaging of Robert Lowell’s adaptation of this poem (New York Review of Books, 4 December 1969).

(258) ‘The paintings he most likely had in mind were Monet’s Lilas au soleil and Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre and Place du Théâtre Français, Printemps’ (J. Baines).

(From 267 and 268) My abbreviated version combines two poems on Ariosto. ‘The manuscripts and drafts [of the first] were taken away when we were searched in May 1934. In Voronezh, O.M. tried to remember the text, but his memory failed him and he wrote a second Ariosto. Soon, on a trip to Moscow, I found the 1933 Ariosto in one of my hiding-places. So there were now two poems with the same theme and material. This is a story in the spirit of the times – and I present it to future commentators’ (N.M., from Chapter 42, translated by Donald Rayfield).

Line 2 – Peter the Great learnt how to shave beards, pull teeth and chop off heads. Through Peter, O.M. is alluding to Stalin.

(286) The poem that led to O.M.’s first arrest, in 1934. As he said to N.M.: ‘Above all, I detest… fascism.’

Line 4 – ‘man of the mountains’: for this see the version by Richard and Elizabeth McKane in Osip Mandelshtam: The Moscow Notebooks (Bloodaxe, 1991).

From Journey to Armenia: Akhmatova wondered how, in 1933, this passage got past the censor. In fact, the editor of Star, a Leningrad literary journal, disobeyed the censor; it cost him his job, but he was not arrested.

Arshak – O.M.; Shapukh – Stalin; Darmastat – Bukharin (executed 1938), who was O.M.’s protector and responsible for his being able to journey to Armenia.

(296) Lament inspired by O.M.’s contemplation of N.M.’s fate. In 1934 O.M. was arrested and spent two weeks in the Lubianka prison, where he was interrogated and tortured. As a supreme and miraculous act of clemency on the part of the ‘Boss’, he was sentenced to only three years’ exile; Stalin ordered that O.M. should be ‘isolated but preserved’.

Of the Voronezh poems D. Rayfield has said: ‘The poet as a thinker, as an incarnation of the Hellenic spirit, barely functions. He is only an eye bewildered by forests, rivers, earth, wooden houses, the open spaces and the boundless sky of the steppes, which itself seems to him to be an eye on a cosmic plane. His thoughts are paralysed by an instinctive feeling of a predator’s presence, the Kremlin which is now the axis on which the poet’s world rotates’ (‘Mandelshtam’s Voronezh poetry’, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975); ‘the poetry of 1933 and afterwards has a posthumous quality, breathing borrowed air on borrowed time’ (Grosseteste Review; Vol. 7, Nos. 1–3. ‘Deaths and Resurrections: the Later Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam’).

(306) Curvature, like that of the earth’s surface, is a curious feature of Red Square, both as viewed from one side to the other, and also along the other axis, as it slopes down to the River Moskva. ‘Red Square symbolizes the rotten core of the system… [The] Stalinist Terror… knows no limits’ (J. Baines).

(307) ‘foot’: ‘the human and the metric foot which must both walk the black earth’ (D. Rayfield).

‘muttering lips’: ‘the symbol of [his] poetry’ (J. Baines).

(318) N.M. brought O.M. ‘a souvenir of the past, a small bag of stones from Koktebel… [O.M.] affirms his predilection for the more prosaic pebbles from the sea’ (J. Baines). There is an untranslatable pun in the second line: opal means ‘opal’, opala ‘disgrace’ in Russian.

(319) O.M. ‘was beginning to see the soldiers as victims rather than oppressors, as vassals in the power of oriental-style despots, with their exotic retinues… of janissaries and eunuchs’ (J. Baines).

‘Lines on Stalin’: O.M.’s ‘positive’ ode to Stalin. The original consists of seven twelve-line stanzas.

In January 1937, in exile, with the rope around his neck, O.M. tried to write an ode in praise of Stalin to save his wife’s life and his own. The attempt failed: this is part of the remarkably ambiguous result.

See Slavic Review, 1975; Bengt Jangfeldt: ‘O.M.’s “Ode” to Stalin’, Scando-Slavica, 1976; Clarence Brown: ‘Into the Heart of Darkness: Mandelshtam’s Ode to Stalin’, Slavic Review, 1967; and J. Baines: Mandelshtam: The Later Poetry.

(350) ‘The historical perspective which caused Mandelshtam to see [Stalin] as the Judas not so much of present but of future generations was seldom achieved by his contemporaries in 1937, at the height of the Terror’ (J. Baines).

(354) Third stanza, line 4: the ‘shadow’ Mandelshtam might have ‘begged favour of’ is Stalin.

(358) Henry Gifford (in a letter to me): ‘The “stale loaves” suggest to me Dante’s bread that tastes of salt, or what is called in Richard II “the bitter bread of banishment”.’

(366) ‘Urals’: in 1934 Mandelshtam was exiled to the Urals, to Cherdyn (where – thinking he was going to be arrested again by the secret police – he threw himself out of the window of the hospital), and travelled along the Volga to arrive there.

‘These steppes’ refers to the area around Voronezh.

I am indebted to R. Chandler for drawing my attention to the fact that ‘here are all my rights’ refers to Pushkin’s poem From Pindemonte (1836), in which he says he doesn’t mind about censorship, not having the right to vote, etc.; all he cares about is that he should be left to himself, not have to give account to others of what he does, and be free to wonder at the godlike beauties of nature and art: ‘Here is my happiness! Here are my rights…’

R. F. Holmes has pointed out to me that ‘of course both poets did care about other things than being left to themselves… Mandelshtam, besides attacking Stalin, attacked one Caesar at least, two Tsars, Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini.’ (In Rome, composed in 1937, Rome is characterized as a ‘nursery for murder’; ‘The degenerate chin of the dictator/Sags over Rome’).

(367) This poem was written during the time when Mandelshtam was particularly obsessed with Joseph Stalin. Wasp, in Russian, is osa, axis is os’. Joseph, in Russian, can be either Osip or Iosif.

O.M. ‘obviously listed here some of the arts officially… encouraged in the mid-thirties, the period of violin-competitions, portrait-painting, the revival of the classical opera…’ (O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandelshtam).

(368) The last poem in Mandelshtam’s Stalin cycle. Scythe, in Russian, is ‘kosa’. The cuckoo, as also in ‘the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower’ (no. 121), alludes to a passage from The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a twelfth-century poem in which Yaroslavna, Igor’s wife, mourns him ‘like a desolate cuckoo’. ‘On the Danube Yaroslavna’s voice is heard: like a desolate cuckoo she cries early in the morning. “I will fly,” she says, “like a cuckoo along the Danube, I will dip my sleeve of beaver-fur in the river Kayala, I will wipe the Prince’s bleeding wounds…”’ (Penguin Book of Russian Verse, edited by D. Obolensky). ‘[Mandelshtam] lamented his failing eyesight, which had once been “sharper than a whetted scythe” but had not had time to pick out each of the “lonely multitude of stars”.’ (N.M., Hope Against Hope.)

(370) Here O.M., according to D. Rayfield, sees himself as Daniel who championed Israel (Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975).

‘The singer is free to descend into the lion’s den, since her voice can conquer the lion, escape from the fortress – Marian Anderson’s speciality was negro spirituals…’ (J. Baines).

The poem combines two images: of Marian Anderson, whose deep voice O.M. had heard on the radio; and of a singer friend whose husband had just been re-arrested after recent release from five years in a camp. (See Hope Against Hope, chapter 39.)

(384) N.M., the ‘child’ or ‘little one’, is entrusted in this lullaby to the care of the stars because ‘the radiance of the stars is also that of his poetry’ (J. Baines).

O.M. was embarrassed, as far as eventual publication might be concerned, by the intimacy of what he called ‘these verses of the bed.’

(385) ‘… Hera was first worshipped in the form of a cow’ (J. Baines).

(387) ‘The Greek flute’s sounds are clearly the poetic force before it has been precipitated in language… [The] flute’s music… crosses barriers, it is unselfconscious… The poet creates his own past; “making his native sea” out of clay, like the Cretan potters… [But] the flautist is in the past, unrepeatable. He is what the poet might have been or continued being, had the Hellenic world not fallen apart. Now nothing works: the sea gives no birth… [it] kills instead of giving life… [Mandelshtam’s] lips cannot work the flute, and the balance of forces… topples, leaving only the destructive, negative force to silence poetry… If there is a moral in the poem, it is that the poet, conscious of his individual death, is tainted by his fear and loses his gift of immersing himself in the medium of poetry’ (D. Rayfield, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975).

Rayfield points out that sea (more) changes into its phonetic twin plague (mor) – which I have rendered as disease; similarly the ‘syllable ub joins the flautist’s mouth (zuby, teeth, and guby, lips) in a fatal conjunction with death (ubiystvo, murder…). – This sort of thing, of course, drives the translator to despair, if not self-destruction.

N.M. writes about this poem in Hope Against Hope, chapter 39: ‘Since he works with his voice, a poet’s lips are the tools of his trade, and in… [this] poem O.M. is also speaking about his own whispering lips and the painful process of converting into words the sounds ringing in his ears… The poem is… about a flute player we knew… He would bring great comfort to O.M. by playing Bach or Schubert for him. Schwab… [was] accused of espionage and sent to a camp for common criminals… He was already an old man and he ended his days there.’

(388) Henry Gifford discusses an early poem by Pasternak where the latter mentions ‘sticky greenery’, which seems to evoke the ‘sticky little leaves opening in spring’ that reconciled Ivan Karamazov to life (Henry Gifford, Pasternak).

(394) The limping woman was Natasha Shtempel, whom the Mandelshtams knew in Voronezh.