FOUR POEMS BY OSIP MANDELSTAM
***
No need to speak at any rate,
One ought to never educate,
It’s sad, and beautiful in part, -
The wild animal’s dark heart:
It feels no urge to educate,
It cannot speak at any rate,
It dives, a dolphin, young and bold,
Into the gray depths of the world.
December 1909, Heidelberg
***
I was given a body – what to do with it now,
One so unique and my own somehow?
For this quiet joy, to breathe and to be,
Whom should I thank, somebody tell me?
I’m the gardener, I’m the flower as well,
I’m not alone in world’s dungeon cell.
On the glass of eternity, I’ve already left
A mark of my warmth, a mark of my breath.
And on its surface, a pattern is made
Unrecognizable still of late.
Let the cloudiness of the moments cascade –
The lovely pattern will never fade.
1909
Tristia
I’ve learned the art of parting in the midst
Of open-headed lamentations in the night.
The oxen graze, and so the wait persists –
The end of city vigil is in sight,
I’m honoring the cockerel night tradition,
When, taking up road’s sorrow in travail,
The tear-stained eyes gazed off with premonition
And muses’ song fused with a woman’s wail.
And who could ever know, on hearing “parting,”
What sort of separation we would face,
What sort of wisdom was the cock imparting,
As flames in the acropolis would blaze,
And in the dawning of some brand new life,
Just as an ox chews lazily in his stall,
Why did the cock, the herald of the new life,
Beat with his wings, atop the city wall?
I love simplicity of weaving; round and round,
The shuttle turns, the spindle hums anew.
Look there, ahead, as if the swan’s white down,
The barefoot Dalia is soaring towards you!
“Our life is poor and meager at its core,
The language of our joy is insufficient!
All’s happened once, all will repeat once more,
The sole delight – a flash of recognition.
So let it be: a shape, transparent, round,
Lies in the middle of a clean clay plate,
And, like a squirrel’s pelt stretched out,
A girl looks at the molten wax, dismayed.
The Grecian Erebus is not for us to guess.
Warm wax for women is like bronze for men.
Our fate is cast in battles, not at rest.
But they will die, divining till the end.
1918
***
We, dissembling and posing,
Happily forget to gauge
How in youth we’re even closer
To our death than at old age.
While the child pulls his scorn
From the saucer, full of wrath,
I have none to blame in turn, -
I’m alone on every path.
But I’m no fish and I refuse
To faint away in waters’ flurry,
And I prize the right to choose
All my suffering and worry.
1932
From Silentium: Poetry of Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam (January 15, 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist, and a founding member of Acmeist school of Russian poetry. He is considered by many to be one of the most significant Russian poets of the twentieth century, along with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Heavily censored and persecuted by the Soviet authorities for counter-revolutionary activities, he spent most of his later years in exile, until his death in Siberia.
