Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems

Achaean men fit out the Horse in the dark,
They hack into the walls with their toothed saws,
Nothing can quiet the blood’s dry murmur,
And you have no name, no sound, no copy.

How could I think you would come back, how could I dare?
Why did I break with you before it was time?
The gloom hasn’t lightened and the cock hasn’t crowed,
The hot axe hasn’t yet split the wood.

The walls ooze resin like a transparent tear,
The town feels its wooden ribs,
But blood has rushed to the ladders and taken it by storm,
The men have been enticed three times in dreams.

Where is dear Troy? Where the imperial, where the maidenly house?
Priam’s lofty starling-coop shall be a ruin.
And arrows fall like dry, wooden rain
And other arrows grow from the ground like hazel-nut trees.

The last star-pricks are dying out painlessly,
As morning, a grey swallow, raps at the window.
And lethargic day, like an ox waking in straw,
Stirs on the streets, tousled by long sleep.

When the city moon looks out on the streets,
And slowly lights the impenetrable town,
And darkness swells, full of melancholy and bronze,
And songs of wax are smashed by the harshness of time;

And the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower,
And the ashen woman descends to reap the dead world,
Quietly scattering huge spokes of shadow,
And strews yellowing straw across the floorboards…

When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped
Into the ring of dancing shadows
Stamping on the tender meadow,
A mist of sound was left of what had melted.

To begin with I thought the name was ‘seraph’
And I fought shy of such a light body,
A few days passed and I blended with it
And dissolved into that dear shadow.

And again from the apple-tree wild fruit falls,
And the secret form flickers in front of me,
Blaspheming and cursing itself
And swallowing jealousy’s hot coals.

Then happiness rolls by like a golden hoop
Fulfilling someone else’s will,
And cutting the air with the palm of your hand
You chase the sweetness of Spring.

And it is so arranged that we do not dance away
From these spell-bound circles.
The expansive hills of virginal earth
Lie swaddled away.

I like the grey silences under the arches:
Public prayer, funeral processions,
The affecting obligatory rites and requiems at Saint Isaac’s.

I like the priest’s unhurried step,
The winding-sheet’s expansive bodying-forth,
Lent’s Galilean gloom, like an ancient fishing-net,

And smoke of the Old Testament on glowing altars,
And the priest’s orphaned cry. And royal meekness:
Unsullied snow on shoulders, wild purple vestments.

Hagia Sophia and Saint Peter’s – everlasting barns of air and light,
Storehouses of universal goods,
Granaries of the New Testament.

Not to either of you is the spirit drawn in years of grave disaster:
Here, up the wide and sullen steps,
The wolves of tribulation slink; we’ll never betray their tracks:

For the slave is free, having overcome fear,
And in cool granaries, in deep bins,
The grain of whole and perfect faith is stored.

I was washing at night in the courtyard,
Harsh stars shone in the sky.
Starlight, like salt on an axe-head –
The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.

The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure
Than truth’s clean canvas.

A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.

To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch,
To some, a fragrant wine with cinnamon,
Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars
To carry back to smoke-filled huts.

A little still-warm chicken dung,
Sheep’s muddle-headed warmth:
For life, I would give everything –
For so-much-needed care, for a match to warm me.

Look: in my hand there’s only an earthenware bowl;
A chirping of stars is tickling my thin ear;
Through this pitiful down I have to admire
The yellowness of grass and the warmth of the soil.

Quietly to be carding wool and tedding straw;
To starve like an apple-tree in its winter binding;
Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;
Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.

Let the conspirators, like sheep, speed over the snow.
Let the brittle snow-crust crack.
Winter – to some – is a lodging of wormwood and acrid smoke,
To some the stern salt of ceremonial wounds.

Oh to raise a lantern on a long stick,
Under the salt of stars to follow a dog,
And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard.
But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.

Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips,
The bull furiously paws at the green breakers;
A ladies’ man, no oarsman, he snorts,
His spine unused to its laborious burden.

An occasional dolphin leaps in an arc,
A sea-urchin comes into view. Hold in your arms,
Tender Europa, all his worldly possessions:
Where could a bull find a more desirable yoke?

Bitterly she heeds the mighty splashing:
The corpulent and fertile sea is seething.
Aghast at the water’s oily brilliance,
She would like to slide down those hirsute cliffs.

Ah, she would prefer the company of sheep,
The creak of rowlocks or the lap of a spacious deck,
And fish flickering beyond a lofty poop. –
But the oarless oarsman swims with her further and further!

As the leaven swells,
So the housewife’s thrifty soul
Is possessed by the heat of the loaves,

As if Sophias of bread
Raise cupolas of rounded ardour
From a table of cherubim

And to coax a miraculous surplus
With force or caresses, the kingly herd-boy –
Time – seizes the bread, the word.

Even the stale stepson of the centuries
Finds his place – as the cooling makeweight
For loaves already lifted from the oven.

I climbed into the tousled hayloft,
Breathed the hay-dust of the mouldering stars,
The dishevelment of space,

And on the ladder pondered: why
Wake up a swarm of sounds, the miracle of Aeolian order,
Athwart this everlasting squabble?

Once more I want to strike a match,
To shove the night with my shoulder –
To wake it up.

The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,
The hayloft’s ancient chaos
Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.