Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems

Palaver of the waves…
Harmony of tears…
The bell of brotherhood…

Mumbling, you bring us
The grape flesh, poetry,
To refresh the palate.

Pour your eternal dreams, samples of blood,
From one glass to another.

In the raised head, a hint of wing –
But the coat is flapping;
In the closed eyes, in the peace
Of the arms: energy’s pure hiding-place.

Here is a creature that can fly and sing,
The word malleable and flaming,
And congenital awkwardness is overcome
By inborn rhythm!

I was only in a childish way connected with the established order:
I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;
And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,
However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.

I never stood under the Egyptian portico of a bank
With ponderous importance, frowning, in a beaver-fur mitre,
And above the lemon-coloured Neva
No gypsy girl ever danced for me to the crackle of hundred-rouble notes.

Sensing future executions, from the howl of stormy events
I ran to the Black Sea nymphs,
And from the beauties of that time – from those tender European ladies –
How much confusion, strain and grief I embraced!

Why does this city still retain
Its ancient rights over my thoughts and feelings?
Fire and frost have made it more insolent:
Self-satisfied, doomed, frivolous, youthful!

Perhaps it’s because I saw in a picture-book
Lady Godiva with her ginger mane hanging down
That I still secretly repeat to myself: Lady Godiva,
Goodbye… But I don’t remember now…

Help me, O Lord, to get through this night:
I am afraid for her life, your handmaiden’s. –
Living in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.

For the resounding glory of eras to come,
For their sublime stock of people,
I was deprived of the cup at the elders’ feast
And my happiness and honour.

Our epoch’s wolf-hound grips my back
Though my blood is not wolf’s blood;
Squeeze me, rather, like a hat up the sleeve
Of the Siberian-steppe-fur-coat,

In case I see any trembling or mire
Or blood-splashed bones on the rack,
So for me blue polar foxes may shine
All night in their original beauty.

Take me into the night where the Yenisey flows
And the pine-tree reaches the stars,
Because my blood is not wolf’s blood
And only an equal shall kill me.

I drink to the blossoming epaulette,
To all I’m reproached for and won’t forget:

Asthma and lordly fur-coat,
The bile of the Petersburg climate,

The singing pines of Savoy,
The jug of cream – Alpine joy,

And the oil paintings in Paris. I also rejoice
At roses in the Rolls-Royce,

Champs-Elysées benzine,
Proud English red-heads, quinine.

To the waves of Biscay! I drink, but what with I’m not sure:
The Pope’s Châteauneuf, a happy Spumante, or…?

The painter portrayed for us
Lilac’s violent swoon
And laid on the canvas, like scabs,
Colour’s sonorous gradations.

He knew the density of oil –
Its pastry summer
Baked with violet marrow,
Dilating in its oven.

Even more violet is that shadow there:
A whistling or whip dying like a match,
So that you’d say: chefs in the kitchen
Are preparing plump pigeons.

Veils merely sketched,
A swing you have to guess,
And in this disorder of dusk,
Already a bee keeps house.

It’s cold in Europe, Italy is dark,
And power barbarous like the hands of Peter the Great.
Oh to throw wide open, as soon as possible,
A vast window on the Adriatic.

And I delight in his frenzied leisure:
Babble of sweet and sour, lovely oyster-sounds –
The whirr of a hundred whips. With a knife
I shrink from exposing such a pearl.

Through his window he smiles at the butcher’s stall:
The child, asleep under a net of blue flies;
The soldiers of the Duke now drunk
On wine and garlic and on plague.

Dear Ariosto, maybe a century shall pass –
And we shall pour your azure and our black together
Into one fraternal, vast, blue-black sea.
We were there too. We too drank mead.

We exist, without sensing our country beneath us,
Ten steps away our words evaporate,

But where there are enough for half a conversation
We always commemorate the Kremlin’s man of the mountains.

His fat fingers slimy as worms,
His words dependable as weights of measure.

His cockroach moustache chuckles,
His top-boots gleam.

And around him a riff-raff of scraggy-necked chiefs;
He plays with the lackeydoms of half-men

Who warble, or miaow, or whimper.
He alone prods and probes.

He forges decree after decree like horseshoes:
In the groin, brain, forehead, eye.

Whoever is being executed – there’s raspberry compote
And the gigantic torso of the Georgian.

1. The body of King Arshak is unwashed, his beard runs wild.
2. His fingernails are broken, and wood-lice crawl across his face.
3. His ears, grown dull with silence, once listened to Greek music.
4. His tongue is scabbed from jailer’s food – which once pressed grapes against the palate and was adroit like the tip of a flautist’s tongue.
5. The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is sparse as the bleating of a sheep.
6. King Shapukh, thinks Arshak, has got the better of me and, worse, has taken my air for himself!
7. The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.
8. He commands my hair and fingernails. He grows my beard and swallows my spit, so used has he become to the thought that I am to be found here – in the fortress of Aniush.
9. The Kushan people rose up against Shapukh.
10. They snapped the frontier at an undefended place like a silken thread.
11. Like an eyelash in his eye, the attack pricked King Shapukh.
12. Both enemies screwed up their eyes, so as not to see each other.
13. Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, encouraged the commander of the cavalry from the centre of Shapukh’s army. Darmastat wormed his way into favour, snatched his master, like a chess-piece, out of danger, remaining all the while in public view.
14. He had been governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak’s velvet voice gave orders.
15. Yesterday Arshak was a king, but today is fallen into a crevice, huddles like a baby in the womb, and warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.
16. When the time came for his reward, Darmastat’s request tickled the Assyrian’s keen ears like a feather:
17. Give me a pass to the fortress of Aniush. I should like Arshak to spend one more day, full of sounds, taste and smell, as it used to be when he entertained himself at the chase and saw to the planting of trees.