Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!