Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Poems

Don’t compare: anyone alive is matchless.
I yielded, with a kind of tender terror,
To the flatness of the plains,
And the circle of the sky made me ill.

I appealed to the air, my servant,
Waiting for service or news;
I prepared for a journey, swam along the arc
Of voyages that would never start.

I’m ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

What has contended with oxide and alloys
Burns like feminine silver,
And quiet work silvers the iron
Of the plough, the voice of the poet.

The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance,
I dwindle there, no longer noticed,
But in caressing books, in children’s games,
I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!

Listening, listening to the early ice
Rustling below the bridges,
I remember being luminously tipsy –
Head swimming, going under.

From callous stairways, areas of awkward palaces
On the edges of his Florence,
Alighieri sang more forcefully
From tired lips.

So too my shadow picks
At the grain of the granite,
Eyeing in the dark a row of hulks
That seemed houses in the light,

Or twiddles its thumbs
And yawns with us,
Or kicks up a row,
Warmed by other people’s wine and sky,

And feeds stale loaves
To the importunate swans…

A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp,
Lord and master of his sledge,
Careers across the steaming ice

And I – at odds with the obedient world – rejoice
In this contagion of toboggans,
Amazed by children swooping down:

Steep slopes, silver runners, frosty exhalations.
Oh that our era might slide for ever,
Soundless as squirrels, towards a soft river.

Where can I put myself this January?
Exposed, the town is extravagantly stubborn…
Have I got drunk on doors that lock me out? –
All the catches and fastenings make me want to bellow.

And yapping alleys stretched like stockings,
Streets tangled as an attic,
And cornered creatures crawling into corners
And scuttling out on the sly.

And I slither into a pit, into the warty dark,
Towards the iced-up pump-house,
And, stumbling, munch dead air,
And the feverish rooks rise up.

And I gasp after them, yelling
At some frozen wood-pile:
Just a reader, someone to speak with, a doctor!
A conversation on the bitter stairs!

Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark,
I’ve gone into the depths of time –
And found it numb.
But one rib of mine is a burning spike
Which isn’t guarded by these watching phantoms,
Nor by this sentry asleep under the storm.

Forgive me, magnificent brother, and master,
And father of the black-green darkness…
Like a boy following grown-ups into wrinkled water
I seem to be walking towards a future,
But it seems I shall never see it,
Now that our tribe is troubled by a shadow,
Twilight’s intoxications, hollow years.

Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue,
And the slow sail continued as a cloud –
I’m parted from you, scarcely having known your worth.
Longer than organ fugues and bitter is the twisted seaweed,
Smelling of long-contracted falsities.
My head is tipsy with the tenderness of iron
And rust gnawing gently at the sloping shore…
Why does another sand lie under my head?
You – guttural Urals, muscular Volga,
These steppes – here are all my rights, –
And I must still inhale your air with my entire lungs.

I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry,
Sight fairly moist and the mind clear.
Are the grapes in good condition? The wine-skins?
And the stirrings of Colchis in the blood?
But my chest tightens, I’m tongue-tied:
It’s no longer me singing – my breathing sings –,
My ears sheathed in mountains, head hollow.

An unmercenary song is its own reward:
Comfort for friends, for adversaries tar.

A single-eyed song, growing out of moss,
A single-voiced offering chanted on horses, on hills:
In quivering veins their blood is alive –
The hunters imbibe the wine, inhale the air,
Their only task a vexed and generous justice:
Single-mindedly to betroth and bring
The young pair, sinless, to their wedding.

Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe –
In the pupil a cuckoo, a drop of dew –

Now barely able to pick out, in full magnitude,
The lonely multitude of stars.

Armed with the eyesight of narrow wasps
That suck at the axis of the earth,
I smell everything that’s come my way,
Fruitlessly remembering it by heart.

I neither sing, nor draw,
Nor scrape a black-voiced bow across a string:
I only sting life, and love
To envy the energy of subtle wasps.

Oh if only heat of summer, sting of air,
Could – sidestepping sleep and death –
Some day goad me into hearing
The buzz of earth, buzz of the earth.

I am plunged into a lion’s den, a fort,
And sinking lower, lower, lower
Under the leavening shower of these sounds:
Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.

How close the advent of your summons:
As keen as commandments of childbirth, of the first-born;
Like a string of pearls from Oceania
And meek baskets of Tahitian women.

Motherland of chastening songs, approach
With the deep notes of your resonant voice!
The shy-sweet countenance of wealthy daughters,
Primal mother, isn’t worth your little finger.

My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman’s voice.

If our enemies take me
And people stop talking to me,
If they confiscate the whole world –
The right to breathe, open doors,
Affirm that existence shall go on
And that the people, like a judge, shall judge,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,
My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,
And in a corner of the ominous dark
I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice
And move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,
Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,
Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,
And in the depths of the unguarded night
The eyes of that unskilled labourer, earth, shall shine
And a flock of flaming years swoop down,
And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.
But on this earth (which shall escape decay)
There to wake up life and reason will be – Stalin.