Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems

Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges,
Redden under scourges and to burn in frosts.

Your child-like arms are to lift heavy irons,
To lift heavy irons and to sew mail-bags.

Your tender soles are to walk barefoot on glass,
Barefoot on glass and blood-stained sand.

And I am here to burn for you like a black candle,
Burn like a black candle and not dare to pray.

Over-esteemed, too-black, all in peak condition,
Everything groomed withers, everything aired;
Everything crumbling, coming together like a choir –
Wet clods of my ‘soil and freedom’!

In the days of early ploughing – black, almost blue.
And this is the foundation of unwarlike work –
A thousand mounds of furrowed language:
And something unbounded within these bounds!

And yet the earth is – a blunder, a blunt axe-head;
One cannot implore the earth, even if one falls at its feet:
Still it whets the hearing like a mildewed flute;
It ploughs the ear with a chilly, morning clarinet.

How pleasing fatty topsoil is to ploughshare,
How silent the steppe in its April upheaval!
Well, I wish you well, black earth: be firm, sharp-eyed…
A black-voiced silence is at work.

Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips,
But what I’m going to say every schoolboy shall know by heart:

The earth is at its roundest on Red Square
And its unchained curve is hard,

On Red Square the earth is at its roundest
And its curve, rolling all the way down to the rice fields,

Is unexpectedly expansive
While there are still any slaves on the earth.

You took away my seas and running jumps and sky
And propped my foot against the violent earth.
Where could this brilliant calculation get you?
You couldn’t take away my muttering lips.

My country conversed with me,
Spoiled me, scolded, didn’t listen.
She only noticed me when,
Grown-up, I became an eye-witness.
Then suddenly, like a lens, she set me on fire
With a beam from the Admiralty spire.

For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights,
Those breasts enticing the young Goethe,
Let me be answerable, but not lose all my rights.
There is a multifaceted life beyond the law.

A wave advances – one wave breaking another’s backbone,
Flinging itself at the moon in slavish yearning.
And a young janissary of a whirlpool –
In its untiring tidal metropolis –
Raves, slant-eyed, digging its ditch in the sand.

But through the flaky gloom
An unbuilt wall’s pale teeth rise up.
The soldiers of suspicious sultans
Fall from foaming stairs – dismembered, spattered.
Cold eunuchs bring the poison in.

I shall perform a smoky rite:
In this opal here, in my disgrace,
I see a seaside summer’s strawberries –
Cleft cornelians
And their brothers, agates like ants.

But a pebble from the sea’s depths,
A simple soldier,
Is more dear to me:
Grey, wild,
That no one wants.

I shall not return my borrowed dust
To the earth,
Like a white floury butterfly.
I will this thinking body –
This charred, bony flesh,
Alive to its own span –
To turn into a street, a country.

I can’t make sense of today –
A day somehow yellow-mouthed.
Dock gates stare at me
From anchors and mist.

Through faded water a convoy of battleships
Moves quietly, quietly,
And the narrow pencil-box canals
Look even blacker under ice.

Like a belated present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like its initial,
Diffident sweep.

Its terror is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the leafless circle.

But precariously more powerful than anything
Is its bulging blueness:
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly…

I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world…
See, Aeschylus, how I weep as I draw the portrait of the Leader…
In the friendship of his wise eyes
One suddenly sees – a father!…
(His powerful eyes – sternly kind…)
And I want to thank the hills
That nourished this gristle, this wrist.
He was born in the mountains and knew the bitterness of prison…
I want to call him – not Stalin – but Dzhugashvili!
I seem to see him dressed in his greatcoat and his cap,
On the wonderful square, with his happy eyes…
The furrows of his giant plough reach the sun.
He smiles with the smile of the harvester…

You still haven’t died, you’re still not alone
While – with a beggar-woman for companion –
You delight in the immense plains
And the haze and cold and snow-storms.

In miraculous poverty, opulent privation,
You live alone – consoled, at peace;
These days and nights are hallowed,
Honey-tongued is this innocent labour.

Unhappy any man whom, like his shadow,
A dog’s bark scares and the wind scythes down.
And poor indeed one who, half-alive,
Begs mercy of a shadow.

I look the frost in the face, alone –
It’s going nowhere, I come from nowhere –
And always the breathing wonder of the plain
Ironed, folded without a crease.

The sun is squinting in laundered destitution,
Its frown peaceful and consoled,
The multitude of forests much the same…
Snow crunches in my eyes, innocent as bread.

Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes –
I’m sick of them! And the horizon,
Catching its breath, is flung wide-open.
I need a blindfold for both eyes!

I could better have endured the sand
In layers along the banks of the toothy Kama.
I would have clung to its shy sleeves,
Its ripples, brinks and hollows.

We would have worked in harmony – for a century or second.
Envious of the rapids’ precipitation,
I would have listened under the flowing timber’s bark
To the movement of the fibrous rings.

Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger,
What can we do with the murderous plains?
Surely what we deem to be their openness
We ourselves – falling asleep – behold;
And everywhere the questions swell – where do they go,
And where do they come from?
And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep
Slowly crawling across them –
The space for Judases not yet born.