Selected Poems

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[2] 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. Before James Greene’s, the most readable and accomplished translation we had was by W. S. Merwin, done in collaboration with Clarence Brown. But this was, necessarily and properly, an American translation; a translation, that’s to say, into that one of the twentieth-century idioms which is, and has been ever since Walt Whitman, and even in such an untypical American as Pound, pre-eminently vowed to the open-ended and the discontinuous. Yet Mandelshtam is the most ‘European’ of all Russian poets since Pushkin. How could Merwin have succeeded? Yet he did – to the extent that he does indeed bring over, for a public that has not and cannot have any immediate access to the Mediterranean fountains of European consciousness, as much of Mandelshtam as can survive that oceanic passage. Here however was a chance for that one of the English-speaking idioms which is part of the European consciousness: could the British idiom achieve what by its very nature the American could not? James Greene had his own difficulties; for current British idioms, in so far as they respect the integrity of the verse-line and the verse-stanza (and plainly that was what was involved), characteristically give pattern instead of form, or else – to put it another way – they preserve the arc of the poem’s form only by ‘filling in’, by not having the content of the poem pressing up against the curve of its form with equal pressure at every point. (The opposite danger, which I have not escaped in my versions, is of packing the content against the verse-line so tightly that the verse is felt to be straining and, as it were, bursting at the seams.) James Greene was equal to the challenge. His measuring up to it is shown in the first place by his daring to do what every verse-translator must have guiltily felt he ought to do, but was afraid of doing – that’s to say, by leaving untranslated those parts of poems for which he could find no equivalent in English verse that carried authority. His more positive virtues – particularly in finding English near-equivalents for the punning resemblances in sound which, for Mandelshtam as for Pasternak, function as structural principles, given the richly orchestrated nature of Russian – can be appreciated only by those who can check back against the Russian originals.

Here for the first time we have a faithful version, not of Mandelshtam, but of as much of Mandelshtam as this scrupulous translator is prepared to stand by – faithful as never before, because as never before there is no line of the Russian poems that is not made poetry in English. Previous British versions have been wooden; this one rings – it is bronze, properly Roman bronze.