Osip Mandelshtam - Selected Poems

The morning, unfathomably tender,
Half real and half reverie;
Unquenched drowsiness;
The misty ringing of thoughts…

It may be, night, you do not need me;
Out of the world’s abyss,
Like a shell without pearls,
I am cast on your shores.

Indifferently, you stir the waves
And immitigably sing;
But you shall love and cherish
This equivocal, unnecessary shell.

You shall lie down on the sand close by,
Apparelled in your raiment,
And bind to the shell
The colossal bell of the billows.

And your whispering spray shall fill,
With wind and rain and mist,
The walls of the brittle shell –
A heart where nobody dwells…

I hate the light
Of the monotonous stars.
Salutations to you, my ancient delirium –
Altitude of an arrowed tower!

Be lace, stone,
Become a cobweb:
Lacerate the void
With a fine needle.

My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.
Yes – but where will the shaft
Of living thought fly?

My time and journey over,
Perhaps I shall return:
I couldn’t love there;
Here – I’m afraid to…

In the haze your image
Trembled; it troubled
And eluded me: mistakenly
I said, ‘Good God!’

The name of the Lord – a large bird –
Flew from my breast.
In front: a swirl of mist.
Behind: the empty cage.

No, not the moon, but a bright clock-face
Shines on me. Am I to blame
If the feeble stars strike me as milky?

And I loathe Batyushkov’s conceit:
When asked the time,
His answer was – Eternity.

I am overcome by dread
In the face of mysterious heights;
I’m satisfied by a swallow in the sky
And I love the way a bell-tower soars!

I feel I am the age-old traveller
Who, on bending planks, above the abyss,
Listens to the snowball grow
And eternity strike on stone clocks.

If it could be! But I am not that wayfarer
Flickering against faded leaves:
True sadness sings in me.

There’s an avalanche in the hills!
And all my self is in the bells,
Though music cannot save one from the abyss!

I’m not in favour of premeditated happiness:
Sometimes nature is a grey blemish
And I’m sentenced, slightly tipsy,
To taste the colours of impoverishment.

The wind is playing with a tousled cloud,
The anchor scrapes the ocean bottom;
My mind, lifeless as linen,
Hangs over nothingness.

But I like the casino on the dunes:
The vast view from the misty window,
A thin ray of light on the crumpled tablecloth;

And, with greeny water all around,
When, like a rose, the wine is in its glass,
I like to follow the sea-gull’s wings!

On a walk I came across a funeral
Near the Lutheran church, last Sunday.
An absentminded passer-by, I stopped to watch
The rigorous distress on the faces of the flock.

I couldn’t make out what language they were speaking,
And nothing shone except fine brass
And reflections from the lazy horse-shoes
On the toneless Sunday side-roads.

In the resilient half-light of the carriage
Where sadness, the dissembler, lay entombed,
Wordless and tearless and chary of greetings
A buttonhole of autumn roses gleamed.

The foreigners stretched out in a black ribbon
And weeping ladies went on foot,
Red faces veiled; while, above them,
Nothing stopped the stubborn coachman.

Whoever you were, Lutheran deceased,
They buried you with ease and artlessness,
Eyes were dimmed with the decency of tears,
Bells rang out with dignified restraint.

I thought – no need for speeches:
We are not prophets nor precursors,
We do not delight in heaven nor live in fear of hell,
In dull noon we burn like candles.

Hagia Sophia – here the Lord commanded
That nations and tsars should halt!
Your dome, according to an eye-witness,
Hangs from heaven as though by a chain.

All centuries take their measure from Justinian:
Out of her shrine, in Ephesus, Diana allowed
One hundred and seven green marble pillars
To be pillaged for his alien gods.

How did your lavish builder feel
When – with lofty hand and soul –
He set the apses and the chapels,
Arranging them at east and west?

A splendid temple, bathing in the peace –
A festival of light from forty windows;
Under the dome, on pendentives, the four Archangels
Sail onwards, most beautiful of all.

And this sage and spherical building
Shall outlive centuries and nations,
And the resonant sobbing of the seraphim
Shall not warp the dark gilt surfaces.

Where a Roman judged a foreign people
A basilica stands and, first and joyful
Like Adam once, an arch plays with its own ribs:
Groined, muscular, never unnerved.

From outside, the bones betray the plan:
Here flying buttresses ensure
That cumbersome mass shan’t crush the walls –
A vault bold as a battering-ram is idle.

Elemental labyrinth, unfathomable forest,
The Gothic soul’s rational abyss,
Egyptian power and Christian shyness,
Oak together with reed – and perpendicular as tsar.

But the more attentively I studied,
Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold,
The more I thought: I too one day shall create
Beauty from cruel weight.

Poisoned bread, satiated air,
Wounds impossible to bind.
Joseph, sold into Egypt, couldn’t have pined
With a deeper despair!

Bedouin, under the starry sky,
Each on a horse,
Shut their eyes and improvise
Out of the troubles of the day gone by.

Images lie close at hand:
Someone traded a horse,
Somebody else lost his quiver in the sand.
The hazy happenings disperse.

And if truly sung,
Wholeheartedly, at last
Everything vanishes, nothing is left
But space, and stars, and singer.

Horses’ hooves… The clatter
Of crude and simple times.
And the yardmen, in their sheepskin coats,
Sleep on the wooden benches.

A clamour at the iron gates
Wakes the royally lazy doorman,
Whose wolfish yawning
Recalls the Scythians

When Ovid, with senile love,
Blended Rome and snow,
And sang of the ox- and bullock-waggons
In the march of the barbarians.