Selected Poems

Translator’s Preface

The question of how to translate – should translations, like wives and husbands, be ‘faithful’ or ‘free’? – has continued to be controversial ever since the literal-minded Gavin Douglas rebuked Caxton for his ‘counterfeit’ of Virgil, and Dryden (two hundred years later) aligned himself cautiously on the other side: ‘something must be lost in all Transfusion, that is, in all Translation.’ Where I sometimes add ‘from’ to the number in brackets at the bottom of each poem, this is to indicate that, in these versions, lines (and sometimes whole stanzas) have been omitted, in an attempt to produce poems that work in English, as Pound’s transformations of Rihaku do. Occasionally I compress two of Mandelshtam’s poems into one. (Boris Bukhshtab wrote in 1929: ‘in Mandelshtam’s poetry every stanza is practically autonomous… Any stanza can be discarded or added.’[3] This was not intended by him as a criticism. I leave it to the reader to work out how or if this can be reconciled with Clarence Brown’s statement concerning no. 39 that a poem for Mandelshtam ‘is a structure of words that support and oppose each other, as a cathedral is a structure of stones that support each other’.)

Mandelshtam’s poems are rhymed and strictly metrical, Whoever finds a horseshoe being the main exception. I have often had to eschew rhyme (but not half-rhyme, internal rhymes or assonance), and have tried to feel my way towards what might be the right rhythm for English.

To the non-Russian-speaking reader who wants to know about the relation between Mandelshtam’s metres (which I have not consciously set out to re-enact), length of line, etc., and mine, I can only say: total ‘faithfulness’, were it possible – the ‘same’ metre, rhyme-scheme, pattern of sounds, number of syllables, line-length, etc., etc. – would be an absurdity; translations that attempt ‘faithfulness’ to metre and rhyme-scheme of the originals are usually unfaithful in a more important sense: they fail to have the same effect on an English reader as the original on a reader in the original language.

In her Foreword Nadezhda Mandelshtam writes: ‘Mandelshtam said that the contents are squeezed from the form as water from a sponge.’ She is wrong. Here is a translation of what Mandelshtam in fact wrote in his essay ‘Conversation about Dante’:

In connection with this, R. F. Holmes has written to me: ‘I think Mandelshtam imagines the concept in the poet’s mind being squeezed out by him in a form of words. Hence the concept, “strange as it may seem… envelops the form”. If the mind contains no idea, the form-of-words coming out will be valueless; if the sponge is dry, nothing will come out of it.’ Or, as Jennifer Baines has put it: ‘Mandelshtam was tireless in his condemnation of those who advocated the separation of form from content.’[4]

Kiril Taranovsky, Nils Nilsson and Omry Ronen have in recent years addressed themselves to the question formulated by Akhmatova – ‘who will tell us where that new, divine harmony, Mandelshtam’s poetry, came from?’ Thanks to their work (see Further Reading), we know much more about Mandelshtam’s literary subtexts and contexts, and about the ‘echoes and correspondences, reflections and refractions’ which Henry Gifford alludes to in an essay on Mandelshtam and Dante,[5] and are better able to decipher the message of Mandelshtam’s texts.

The Russian text I have mostly used, and the numbering of Mandelshtam’s poems given in brackets at the bottom of each poem, come from his Sobraniye sochineniy (Collected Works), second edition revised and expanded, edited by G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, Inter-Language Literary Associates, Vol. I, Washington, 1967. But I have also referred to the latest texts. Rather more than fifty of the poems contained in the present selection were not among those translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin in Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1973; Penguin, 1977).

The Soviet editions of 1973 and 1974, edited by N. I. Khardzhiev, are not as comprehensive as the American edition. Of the poems translated here the Soviet editions exclude (in addition to both Odes to Stalin, positive and negative) nos. 91, 165, 223, 233, 267/268, 307, 316, 318, 319, 320, 329, 341, 350, 351, 352, 353, 359, 368, 372, 380, 385 and 387, some for what must be ideological reasons.

In the following lines, written as a black joke in 1935, Mandelshtam indicated what his official fate would be:

After Stalin’s death Mandelshtam was ‘rehabilitated’, but there is still no street anywhere in the Soviet Union named after him.

Mandelshtam’s Voronezh poems of 1937 appear in this book in a new order. This is the result of Jennifer Baines’s authoritative commentary, Mandelshtam: The Later Poetry (1976). Her dating, which is based on Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelshtam’s own typescript copy of Mandelshtam’s poems, is definitive and supersedes that of Struve and Filippov’s American edition (but the numbering of the poems printed here is still Struve and Filippov’s).

Many of the 103 translations in this volume are based on earlier versions contained in a selection first published by Elek Books in 1977, reissued with additions and revisions by Granada Publishing in 1980 and then published by Angel Books under the title The Eyesight of Wasps in 1988. Since 1988 the versions have been revised again, often extensively, to keep pace with my understanding of Mandelshtam and to attain a more precise relationship with the originals; this has been achieved mainly with the help of R. F. Holmes’s and Maxwell Shorter’s superior knowledge of Russian.

Eight poems from the 1980 volume have been liquidated: nos. 66, 84, 235, 275–85, 346/347, 357, 362, 374. The following are added to the present selection: nos. 62, 109, 140, 164, 222, 223, 233, 258, 267/268, 286, a passage from Journey to Armenia, 296, 299, 306, 312, 316, 318, 319, 320, part of the Ode to Stalin, 360.

Some of the earlier versions first appeared in Agenda, Bananas, Cyphers, English, the New Review, New Statesman, the New Yorker, Poetry and Audience, Quarto, The Times Literary Supplement and Willow Springs; and some were used in Caspar Wrede’s play about Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, put on in 1982 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

I want to thank R. F. Holmes, who with unstinting generosity has kept me at it over the years, and Donald Rayfield, who contributed the introduction and select bibliography. For this particular edition (1991) I am especially indebted to Katie Campbell, Robert Chandler, Stephen Duncan, Maria Enzensberger, Martha Kapos, Maxwell Shorter and Robert Stein, all of whom re-awakened my interest in these poems, brought them back to life for me; and to Richard McKane for invaluable information about the new and established textual variants (new since the Struve and Filippov edition).