Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Poems

(82) Troezen was where Hippolytus died.

(89) Petropolis ‘was Derzhavin’s and Pushkin’s name for Petersburg… A whole cultural tradition is threatened, dying’. ‘It is not Athena, a goddess noted for her mercifulness and generosity, the goddess of wisdom, who reigns, but Proserpina, queen of the underworld’ (S. Broyde).

(90) Dedicated to Marina Tsvetayeva. I have translated the poem in its original form, as given in Tsvetayeva’s ‘The history of one dedication’ ( Oxford Slavonic Papers XI, 1964).

(92) ‘Tauris’: the Crimea.

(93) ‘the image of the “amulet buried in the sand” should be deciphered as “poetry addressed to the reader in posterity”’ (K. Taranovsky).

‘[O.M.’s] visions of classical antiquity are not “Homeric”, “Sapphic”, or “Horatian”, but Mandelshtamian… It is “world culture”, not ancient culture, that is the leitmotif of Mandelshtam’s poetry’ (Victor Terras, ‘Classical Motifs in the Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam’ ( Slavic and East European Journal , 3, 1966).

Persephone (or Kore or Proserpina), Queen of the Underworld, spends two-thirds of the year with her mother Demeter (the Greek corn-goddess). ‘This is the “light” part of the annual circle…’ The black sail is ‘still another topos of Greek mythology, known best from the myth of Theseus and Ariadne’ (Victor Terras).

Line 20: ‘Black rose-flakes’ is an allusion to O.M.’s mother’s death (see N.M., Hope Abandoned ).

(104) Stanza 1: ‘In the stillness of night a lover pronounces one tender name instead of another, and suddenly realises that this has happened once before: the words and the hair and the cock who has just crowed under the window crowed already in Ovid’s Tristia . And he is overcome by a deep joy of recognition…’ (O.M., ‘The Word and Culture’, in Sobraniye sochineniy ).

Line 4: ‘M’s elegy… attains a genuine Latin ring, as Tynyanov observes, by introducing the entirely foreign word vigilia , which changes the chemistry of the whole stanza’ (Henry Gifford, Poetry in a Divided World ).

Stanza 3: Clarence Brown refers to ‘the special kind of cognition that takes place when a poet composes a poem. Mandelshtam declares that this is in fact recognition’ (‘Mandelshtam’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, Delos , Austin, Texas, 1968, No. 1).

Compare Fet’s poem which begins: ‘How threadbare our language!’

Line 25 onwards: see Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin V: 4–10. ‘The method [of divination] was to melt a candle into a shallow dish of water, where the suddenly cooled wax would assume odd shapes, like Rorschach blots or… like a cloud or the stretched pelt of a squirrel… Ovid’s parting from his loved ones as he goes into exile is a paradigm of all partings’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam ).

‘Erebus’: name of ‘a place of darkness between Earth and Hades’. Erebus is the son of Chaos, brother of Night, and father of Day.

Joseph Brodsky’s version of this poem can be inspected in his Less than One , Viking, 1986, p. 128.

(108) Line 4, according to Akhmatova, refers to the death of Pushkin; according to N.M., to the death of any human being. O.M.: ‘Poetry is the plough which turns up time , so that the deepest layer of time – its black earth – appears on top.’

‘The unspoken “name”, the “golden care” of the second stanza is “love”’(Leon Burnett, The Modern Language Review , April 1981).

(109) Written in the Crimea during the Civil War when O.M. and N.M. were not yet permanently together. ‘Our relationship must have aroused in him a keen awareness of his Jewish roots, a tribal feeling, a sense of kinship with his people – I was the only Jewess in his life. He thought of the Jews as being one family, hence the theme of incest… Leah was the name he had given to a daughter of Lot… One night, thinking about me, he had suddenly seen that I would come to him, as Lot’s daughters had to their father’ (N.M., Hope Abandoned .)

(113) ‘The word grows, bearing a green branch like the dove released from Noah’s ark’ (Lidija Ginzburg, ‘The Poetics of Osip Mandelshtam’, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism , edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975).

(116) Bees were sacred to Persephone, ‘her messengers to Man’ (N. A. Nilsson, Mandelshtam: Five Poems ).

‘The poetic word, metaphorically transformed into a kiss as a source of joy, is simultaneously a small, hairy bee which… has the orphic power of transmutation’; the necklace ‘is a special artefact, composed of “dead bees”, words which have perished in their normal usage; these “apian” words have reversed the normal process by converting honey into sunlight’ (Tom Stableford, The Literary Appreciation of Russian Writers ).

‘The dense night forest of Taigetos’: the high mountain overlooking Sparta, the domain of Artemis and Apollo, where the bees produce ‘not the sweet honey of Hymettos but a honey with… a darker and wilder taste’ (Nilsson).

(119) Line 16: See the Odyssey , Book IV, lines 219–84.

(124) Stanza 4: In a poem written in 1916, Mandelshtam alludes to Rome, Byzantium and Moscow – ‘the three meetings of mankind and Providence… Byzantium had perished and the Grace of God had passed over to Russia’ (K. Taranovsky).

Stanza 6: Henry Gifford (private communication): ‘The slave who has overcome his fear is free – to endure unhappiness…’

‘Mandelshtam’s Poems register a disintegration so absolute that the magnificent tragedy of Tristia is no longer possible, for tragedy presupposes the existence of generally accepted values’ (Robert Chandler).

(127) Stanza 5 – ‘conspirators’: the Soviet edition substitutes ‘dark people’.

(128) ‘Tender Europa’ is N.M.; the poem was written after their marriage.

(135) The question asked in the first stanza is answered in the second: the artist, the creator, can do these things.

O. Ronen refers to Hamlet as one of the subtexts:

(136) ‘this is an ode (Mandelshtam first subtitled it “a Pindaric fragment”), and, typically of the ode, it is concerned with itself, that is to say, with poetry. The world in which poetry must now exist is as turbulent as that of the forest and ship; everything cracks and shakes… The principal image of the poem, the horseshoe itself, is what is left of the stormy animal, now dead… This is human life frozen in its last attitudes, as though surprised in Herculaneum. The speaker himself now speaks in a resurrected voice, turned to stone, and time, the element that erupted… at line 55, finally flows like lava over everything, obliterating the very self of the speaker at the end’ (Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam .)

‘A “poem” is uniquely able to remain intact while all else changes, and hence to contact an unknown future recipient of an expected gift in which is preserved also a part of the poet’ (S. Broyde).

(140) ‘A crucial “New Year”. Lenin is mortally ill…’ (S. Monas, Notes to Complete Poetry of Mandelshtam ). O. Ronen’s An Approach to Mandelshtam includes a commentary on this poem: ‘Clay’: Ronen refers to Job (‘Thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again’).

Three and half stanzas are untranslated.

Line 16: Ronen: ‘but the singing lips of the age are sealed…’