Poems by Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)

***

I was washing in the yard at night.
The firmament was brilliant with rude stars.
On an axe, the starlight looked like salt –
The barrel cooling, filled up to the brim.

The gates are tightly shut and locked
Аnd the earth in conscience most severe.
No foundation is likely to be found
As pure in truth as fresh canvas.

Like a grain of salt, a star melts in the barrel,
And the water becomes even blacker –
Evil fate more salty, death more pure,
And the earth more frightening and truer.

1921

.::

ARIOSTO

In all of Italy the most genial, the smartest,
Courteous Ariosto has grown a trifle hoarse.
He takes delight in cataloguing fishes
And peppers all the seas with wicked nonsense.

And like a musician with ten dulcimers,
Tirelessly tearing his narration’s thread,
He leads hither and yon, himself not knowing where,
A tangled history of knightly scandals.

In the language of cicadas, a captivating mix
Of Pushkin’s sadness and Mediterranean bluster –
He trips over his own lies, reveling with Orlando,
And quakes from head to foot, transfiguring himself.

And he commands the sea: make noise, and do not think.
And the maiden on the rock: lie uncovered…
Just tell us more – from you, we cannot have enough,
While blood runs in our veins, while our ears are full of noise.

And city of lizards, city without a soul,
If only you gave birth to such men more often,
Oh hard Ferrara! Hurry, and tell us more,
While blood runs in our veins, again right from the start!

Europe is cold. And Italy is dark.
Power is repulsive, like the barber’s fingers.
But he continues to play the courtier to perfection,
Cunningly smiling through the winged window

At the lamb on the hill, at the monk on the donkey,
At the soldiers of the duke, slightly deranged
From wine-drinking, the plague, and garlic,
And at the infant sleeping in a net of flies.

And as for me, I love his furious amusement –
His language meaningless and salty-sweet,
Those lovely couplings of colluding sounds…
Those pearly bivalves that I fear to pry apart.

Courteous Ariosto, perhaps an age will pass
And into a single broad and brotherly blueness
We will yet pour your azure and our Black Sea.
… We were there, too. We, too, have heard those stories…

4–6 May 1933

.::

***

Tell me, thou desert draftsman,
Geometer of the Arabian sands,
Can lines, unbounded, prevail
Against the blowing wind?
“Its Judaic tremor
Never enters my thoughts!”
His memories are of murmurs
And murmurs of memories wrought…

November 1933 – January 1934

.::

***

Today I am in cobwebs made of light –
Black-haired, fair-brown –
Mankind needs light and clear blue air
And it needs bread and Elbrus snow.

And there is no one to consult with me,
While I will hardly find one on my own:
Not in the Urals, not in the Crimea –
There are no such transparent, weeping stones.

Mankind needs a poem mysteriously familiar,
To be awakened by it all his days
And in the sound of it to lave forever –
As in a flaxen curl, a nut-brown wave.

19 January 1937

.::

***

Where are the bound and fastened moans?
Where is Prometheus – the rock’s support and buttress?
And where is the hawk – and the yellow-eyed burst
Of claws emerging from a lowered forehead?

All that is gone: tragedy is no more.
But these lips that draw nearer, nearer –
But these lips enter right into the core
Of Aeschylus the freight handler, of Sophocles the logger.

He is an echo and a hello, a milestone – no, a plowshare.
The stone-and-air theater of growing ages
Has risen to its feet, and everybody wants to see everybody –
Those who were born, the deadly, and the deathless.

17 January – 4 February 1937

-==

Taken from The Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated from Russian into English by Ilya Bernstein, EPC Digital Edition, 2014