Osip Mandelstam
LENINGRAD
I returned to my city, familiar as tears,
As veins, as mumps from childhood years.
You've returned here, so swallow as quick as you can
The cod-liver oil of Leningrad's riverside lamps.
Recognize when you can December's brief day:
Egg yolk folded into its ominous tar.
Petersburg, I don't yet want to die:
You have the numbers of my telephones.
Petersburg, I have addresses still
Where I can raise the voices of the dead.
I live on the backstairs and the doorbell buzz
Strikes me in the temple and tears at my flesh.
And all night long I await those dear guests of yours,
Rattling, like manacles, the chains on the doors.
(221, 144*)
December, 1930, Leningrad
LENINGRAD
Je suis rentré dans ma ville, familier comme des larmes,
Comme les veines, comme les oreillons de l'enfance.
Vous êtes revenu ici, alors avalez le plus vite possible
L'huile de foie de morue des lampes au bord de la rivière de Léningrad.
Reconnaissez quand vous pouvez le bref jour de décembre:
Le jaune d'oeuf plié dans son goudron inquiétant.
Pétersbourg, je ne veux pas encore mourir:
Vous avez les numéros de mes téléphones.
Pétersbourg, j'ai encore des adresses
Où je peux élever la voix des morts.
J'habite à l'arrière et le carillon retentit
Me frappe dans le temple et me déchire la chair.
Et toute la nuit j'attends vos chers invités,
Rattling, comme des menottes, les chaînes sur les portes.
Introduction
The cod-liver oil of Leningrad's riverside lamps.
Recognize when you can December's brief day:
Egg yolk folded into its ominous tar.
Petersburg, I don't yet want to die:
You have the numbers of my telephones.
Petersburg, I have addresses still
Where I can raise the voices of the dead.
I live on the backstairs and the doorbell buzz
Strikes me in the temple and tears at my flesh.
And all night long I await those dear guests of yours,
Rattling, like manacles, the chains on the doors.
(221, 144*)
December, 1930, Leningrad
LENINGRAD
Je suis rentré dans ma ville, familier comme des larmes,
Comme les veines, comme les oreillons de l'enfance.
Vous êtes revenu ici, alors avalez le plus vite possible
L'huile de foie de morue des lampes au bord de la rivière de Léningrad.
Reconnaissez quand vous pouvez le bref jour de décembre:
Le jaune d'oeuf plié dans son goudron inquiétant.
Pétersbourg, je ne veux pas encore mourir:
Vous avez les numéros de mes téléphones.
Pétersbourg, j'ai encore des adresses
Où je peux élever la voix des morts.
J'habite à l'arrière et le carillon retentit
Me frappe dans le temple et me déchire la chair.
Et toute la nuit j'attends vos chers invités,
Rattling, comme des menottes, les chaînes sur les portes.
Note: Tập thơ
này, Gấu mua xon, phần lớn là do bài Intro thần sầu của Brodsky. Sẽ scan và dịch
ASAP
Bài intro,
thực sự là 1 tiểu luận, không chỉ về thơ Osip mà là về thơ. New Tinvan post và
sẽ lai rai viết về nó.
Osip
Mandeltsam không dễ đọc. Số phận bi thảm của ông càng làm cho thơ của ông trở nên
hiếm quí, và lại càng khó đọc, như nhà thơ Robert Hass phán, chúng ta bị hớp hồn
vì số phận của ông hơn là thơ của ông. Phải là Brodsky viết về Mandestam mới tới
chỉ được. Brodsky phán, cái gọi là trữ tình, là đạo hạnh của ngôn ngữ, for lyricism
is the ethics of language. Bạn đọc bài viết này, song song với bài viết của
Edward Hirsch khi ông giới thiệu Thơ Mẽo Hay Nhất 2016, Best US Poetry 2016, có
thể sẽ nhận, cõi thơ Mít sở dĩ nó tệ hại đến như hiện nay, là do thiếu đạo hạnh.
Mấy đấng thi sĩ Mít sợ cũng nắm được nghĩa của từ lyricism. Hơi 1 chút là vãi
linh hồn, đám này giản dị như thế!
Introduction
For
some odd reason, the expression "death of a poet" always sounds
somewhat more concrete than "life of a poet." Perhaps this is because
both "life" and "poet," as words, are almost synonymous in
their positive vagueness. Whereas "death" -even as a word-is about as
definite as a poet's own production, i.e., a poem, the main feature of which is
its last line. Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which
makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last line of a poem
nothing follows except literary criticism. So when we read a poet, we
participate in his or his works' death. In the case of Mandelstam, we
participate in both.
One should bear that in mind while turning these pages,
which are so light. Even if it is true that "he became his admirers,"
their total number is far less interesting than his concise version of them. I
am saying this not out of humility (which admirers, especially when totaled,
are always lacking), nor because there is no substitute for a genius (and there
really is none). I am saying this because what matters in art is precisely the
unique, unrepeatable, unresurrectible mixture of flesh and spirit, and what
makes the achievements of the latter all the more precious is the very
moribundity of the former.
A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker.
Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an
exercise in dying. But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one
write is not so much a concern for one's perishable flesh but the urge to spare
certain things of one’s world – of one’s personal civilization – from one’s own
non-grammatical continuum. Art is not a better, but an alternative existence;
it is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate
it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words. In the case of Mandelstam
the words happened to be those of the Russian language.
For a spirit, perhaps there is no better accommodation:
Russian is a very inflected language. What this means is that the noun could
easily be found sitting at the very end of the sentence, and that the ending of
this noun (or adjective or verb) varies according to gender, number, and case.
All this provides any given verbalization with the stereoscopic quality of the
perception itself, and (sometimes) concretizes and develops the latter. The
best illustration of this is Mandelstam's handling of one of the main themes of
his poetry, the theme of Time.
There is nothing odder than to apply an analytic device to a
synthetic phenomenon; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
But it wouldn't be much easier to apply such a device in Russian either. Poetry
is the supreme result of the entire language, and to analyze it is but to
diffuse the focus. It is all the more true of Mandelstam, who is an extremely
lonely figure in the context of Russian poetry, and it is precisely the density
of his focus that accounts for his isolation. Literary criticism is sensible
only when the critic operates on the same plane of both psychological and
linguistic regard. The way it looks now, Mandelstam is bound for a criticism
coming only from below in either language.
The inferiority of analysis starts with the very notion of
theme, be it a theme of time, love, or death. Poetry is, first of all, an art
of references, allusions, linguistic and figurative parallels. There is an
immense gulf between homo sapiens and
homo scribens because for the writer
the notion of theme appears as a result of combining the above techniques and
devices, if it appears at all. Writing is literally an existential process; it
uses thinking for its own ends, it consumes notions, themes, and the like, not
vice versa. What dictates a poem is the language, and this is the voice of the
language, which we know under the nicknames of Muse or Inspiration. It is
better, then, to speak not about the theme of Time in Mandelstam's poetry, but
about the presence of Time itself, both as the entity and the theme, if only
because Time has its seat within a poem anyway, and it is a caesura.
So, because of that, Mandelstam, unlike Goethe, never
exclaims "O moment, stay! Thou art fair!" but merely tries to extend
his caesura. What is more, he does it not so much because of this moment's
particular fairness or lack of fairness; his concern (and subsequently his
technique) is quite different. It was the sense of an oversaturated existence
that the young Mandelstam was trying to convey in his first two collections,
and he chose the portrayal of overloaded Time for the medium. Using all the
phonetic and allusory power of words themselves, Mandelstam's verse in that
period expresses the slowing-down, lasting sensation of Time's passage. As he
succeeds (which he always does), the effect is the reader’s realization that
the words, even their letters-vowels especially are almost palpable vessels of
Time.
On the other hand, his
is not at all that search for bygone days
with its obsessive
gropings to recapture and to reconsider the past. Mandelstam seldom looks
backward in a poem; he is all in the present, in this moment, which he makes
continue, linger beyond its own natural limit. The past, whether personal or
historical, has been taken care of by the words' own etymology. But however
unProustian his treatment of Time is, the density of his verse is somewhat akin
to the great Frenchman's prose. In a way, it is the same total warfare, the
same frontal attack-but in this case, an attack on the present, and with
resources of a different nature. It is extremely important to note, for
instance, that in almost every case when Mandelstam happens to deal with this
theme of Time, he resorts to a rather heavily caesuraed verse which echoes hexameter
either in its beat or in its content. It is usually an iambic pentameter
lapsing into alexandrine verse, and there is always a paraphrase or a direct
reference to either of Homer's epics. As a rule, this kind of poem is set
somewhere by the sea, in late summer, which directly or indirectly evokes the
ancient Greek background. This is partly because of Russian poetry's
traditional regard for the Crimea and the Black Sea as the only available
approximation to the Greek world, of which these places- Taurida and Pontus
Euxinus-used to be the outskirts. Take, for instance, poems like "The
stream of the golden honey was pouring so slow ..., "Insomnia. Homer.
Tautly swelling sails ...., and "There are orioles in woods and lasting
length of vowels" where there are these lines:
But once a
year Nature is bathed in length,
Which is the
source of Homer's metric strength.
Like a
caesura that day yawns wide,
The
importance of this Greek echo is manifold. It might seem to be a purely
technical issue, but the point is that the alexandrine verse is the nearest kin
to hexameter, if only in terms of using a caesura. Speaking of relatives, the
mother of all Muses was Mnemosyne, the Muse of Memory, and a poem (be it a
short one or an epic) must be memorized in order to survive. Hexameter was a
remarkable mnemonic device, if only because of being so cumbersome and
different from the colloquial speech of any audience, Homer's included. So by
referring to this vehicle of memory within another one-i.e., within his alexandrine
verse-Mandelstam, along with producing an almost physical sensation of Time's
tunnel, creates the effect of a play within a play, of a caesura within a
caesura, of a pause within a pause. Which is, after all, a form of Time, if not
its meaning: if Time does not get stopped by that, it at least gets focused.
Not that Mandelstam does this consciously, deliberately. Or
that this is his main purpose while writing a poem. He does it offhandedly, in
subordinate clauses, by the act of writing (often about something else), never
by writing to make this point. His is not topical poetry. Russian poetry on the
whole is not very topical. Its basic technique is one of beating around the
bush, approaching the theme from various angles. The clear-cut treatment of the
subject matter, which is so characteristic of poetry in English, usually gets
exercised within this or that line, and then a poet moves on to something else;
it seldom makes for an entire poem. Topics and concepts, regardless of their
importance, are but material, like words, and they are always there. Language
has names for all of them, and the poet is the one who masters language.
Greece was always there, so was Rome, and so were the
biblical Judea and Christianity. The cornerstones of our civilization, they are
treated by Mandelstam's poetry in approximately the same way as Time itself
would treat them: as unity-and in their unity. To pronounce Mandelstam adept at
either ideology (and especially at the latter) is not only to miniaturize him,
but to distort his historical perspective, or rather his historical landscape.
Thematically, Mandelstam's poetry repeats the development of our civilization:
it flows north, but the parallel streams in this current mingle with each other
from the very beginning. Toward the Twenties, the Roman themes gradually
overtake the Greek and biblical references, largely because of the poet's
growing identification with the archetypal situation of "a poet versus
Empire." Still, what created this kind of attitude, apart from the purely
political aspects of the situation in Russia at the time, was Mandelstam's own
estimate of his work's proportion to the rest of contemporary literature, as
well as to the moral climate and the intellectual concerns of the rest of the
nation. It was the moral and the mental degradation of the latter which were
suggesting this imperial scope. And yet it was only a thematic overtaking,
never a takeover. Even in "Tristia," the most Roman poem, where the
author merely quotes from the exiled Ovid, one can trace a certain Hesiodic
patriarchal note, implying that the whole enterprise was being viewed through a
somewhat Greek prism. Later, in the thirties during what is known as the
Voronezh period, when all those themes-including Rome and Christianity-yielded
to the "theme" of bare existential horror and a terrifying spiritual
acceleration, the pattern of interplay, of interdependence between those
realms, becomes even more obvious and dense.
It is not that Mandelstam was a "civilized" poet;
he was rather a poet for and of civilization. Once, on being asked to define
Acmeism-the literary movement to which he belonged-he answered: "nostalgia
for a world culture." The notion of a world culture is distinctly Russian.
Because of its location (neither East nor West) and its imperfect history,
Russia has always suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority, at least
toward the West. Out of this inferiority grew the ideal of a certain cultural
unity "out there" and a subsequent intellectual voracity toward anything
coming from that direction. This is, in a way, a Russian version of Hellenisticism,
and Mandelstam's remark about Pushkin's "Hellenistic paleness" was
not in vain.
The mediastinum of this Russian Hellenisticism was St.
Petersburg. Perhaps the best emblem for Mandelstam's attitude toward this
so-called "world culture" could be that strictly classical portico of
the St. Petersburg Admiralty decorated with reliefs of trumpeting angels and
topped with a golden spire with a silhouette of the clipper at its tip. In
order to understand his poetry better, the English-speaking reader perhaps
ought to realize that Mandelstam was a Jew who was living in the capital of
Imperial Russia, whose dominant religion was Orthodoxy, whose political
structure was inherently Byzantine, and whose alphabet had been devised by two Greek
monks. Historically speaking, this organic blend was most strongly felt in Petersburg,
which became Mandelstam's "familiar as tears" eschatalogical niche
for the rest of his not-that-long life.
It was long enough, however, to immortalize this place, and
if his poetry was sometimes called "Petersburgian," there is more than
one reason to consider this definition both accurate and complementary. Accurate
because, apart from being the administrative capital of the empire, Petersburg
was also the spiritual center of it, and in the beginning of the century the
streams of that current were merging there the way they do in Mandelstam's
poems. Complementary because both the poet and the city profited in meaning by
their confrontation. If the West was Athens, Petersburg in the teens of this
century, was Alexandria. This "window on Europe," as Petersburg was
called by Voltaire, this "most invented city," as it was defined
later by Dostoevsky, lying at the latitude of Vancouver, in the mouth of a
river as wide as the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey, was and is
beautiful with that kind of beauty which happens to be caused by madness-or
which tries to conceal this madness. Classicism never had so much room, and Italian
architects who kept being invited by successive Russian monarchs understood
this all too well. The giant, infinite, vertical rafts of white columns from
the facades of the embankments' palaces belonging to the Czar, his family, the
aristocracy, embassies, and the nouveau
riches are carried by the reflecting river down to the Baltic. On the main
avenue of the empire-Nevsky Prospect-there are churches of all creeds. The
endless, wide streets are filled with cabriolets, newly introduced automobiles,
idle, well-dressed crowds, first-class boutiques, confectioneries, etc.
Immensely wide squares with mounted statues of previous rulers and triumphal
columns taller than Nelson's. Lots of publishing houses, magazines, newspapers,
political parties (more than in contemporary America), theaters, restaurants,
gypsies. All this isn surrounded by the brick Birnam woods of the factories'
smoking chimneys and covered by the damp, gray, widespread blanket of the
Northern Hemisphere's sky. One war is lost, another-a world war-is impending,
and you are a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic
pentameters.
In this giant-scale embodiment of the perfect order, iambic
beat is as natural as cobblestones. Petersburg is a cradle of Russian poetry
and, what is more, of its prosody. The idea of a noble structure, regardless of
the quality of the content (sometimes precisely against its quality, which creates a terrific sense of disparity-indicating
not so much the author's but the verse's own evaluation of the described
phenomenon), is utterly local. The whole thing started a century ago, and
Mandelstam's usage of strict meters in his first book, Stone, is clearly reminiscent of Pushkin, and, that of his Pleiade.
And yet, again, it is not a result of some conscious choice, nor it is a sign
of Mandelstam's style being predetermined by the preceding or contemporary
processes in Russian poetry.
The presence of an echo is the primal trait of any good acoustics,
and Mandelstam merely made a great cupola for his predecessors. The most
distinct voices belong to Derzhavin, Baratynsky and Batiushkov. To a great
extent, he was acting very much on his own in spite of any existing
idiom-especially the contemporary one. He simply had too much to say to worry
about his stylistic uniqueness. But this overloaded quality of his otherwise
regular verse was what made him unique.
Ostensibly, his poems did not look so different from the work
of the Symbolists who were dominating the literary scene: he was using fairly
regular rhymes, a standard stanzaic design, and the length of his poems was
quite ordinary-from sixteen to twenty-four lines. But by using these humble
means of transportation he was taking his reader much farther than any of those
cozy-because-vague metaphysicists who called themselves Russian Symbolists. As
a movement, Symbolism was surely the last great one (and not only in Russia);
but poetry is an extremely individualistic art, it mocks isms. The poetic
production of Symbolism was as quantitative and seraphical as the enrollment
and postulates of this movement were. This soaring upward was so groundless
that graduate students, military cadets, and clerks felt tempted, and by the
turn of the century the genre was compromised to a degree of verbal inflation,
somewhat like the situation with free verse in America today. Then, surely,
devaluation as reaction came, bearing the names of Futurism, Constructivism,
Imagism. Still, these were the isms fighting isms, devices fighting devices. To
my taste, only two poets, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, came up with a
qualitatively new content, and their fate reflected in its dreadful way the
degree of their spiritual autonomy.
In poetry, as anywhere else, spiritual superiority is always
disputed at the physical level. One cannot help thinking it was precisely the
rift with the Symbolists (not entirely without anti-Semitic overtones) which
contained the germs of Mandelstam's future. I am not referring so much to
Georgi Ivanov's sneering at Mandelstam's poem in 1917 which was then echoed by
the official ostracism of the thirties, but to Mandelstam's growing separation
from any form of mass production, especially linguistic and psychological, the
result was an effect in which the clearer a voice gets, the more dissonant it
sounds. No choir likes it, and the aesthetic isolation acquires physical
dimensions. When a man creates a world of his own, he becomes a foreign body
against which all laws are aimed: gravity, compression, displacement, and
annihilation.
Mandelstam's world was big enough to invite all of these. I don't
think that had Russia chosen a different historical path, his fate would have
been that much different. His world was too autonomous to merge. Besides,
Russia went the way she did, and for Mandelstam, whose poetic development' was
rapid by itself, that direction could bring only one thing-a terrifying
acceleration. This acceleration affected, first of all, the character of his
verse. Its sublime, meditative, caesuraed flow changed into a swift, abrupt, pattering
movement. His became a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes
cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-understood, with somewhat
abbreviated syntax. And yet in this way it became more a song than ever before,
not a literary but a birdlike song, with its sharp, unpredictable turns and
pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo.
And like that bird, he became a target for all kinds of
stones generously thrown at him by his motherland. It is not that Mandelstam
opposed the political changes taking place in Russia. His sense of measure and
his irony were enough to acknowledge the epic quality of the whole undertaking.
Besides, he was a paganistically bouyant person, and, on the other hand,
whining intonations were completely usurped by the Symbolist movement. Also,
since the beginning of the century, the air was full of loose talk about a redivision
of the world, so that when the Revolution came, almost everyone took what had
occurred for what was desired, Mandelstam's was perhaps the only sober response
to the events which shook the world and made so many thoughtful heads dizzy:
So we might
as well try setting sail:
Huge and clumsy
creaks the turning wheel...
(The
Twilight of Freedom)
But the stones were already flying, and so was the bird. In
the translator's introduction, the reader of this book will find some descriptions
of their trajectories. Still, it is important to note that Mandelstam's
attitude toward a new historical situation: on the whole he regarded it as just
a harsher form of existential reality, as a qualitatively new challenge. Ever
since the Romantics we have had this notion of a poet throwing down the glove
to his tyrant. Now if there ever was such a time at all, this sort of action is
utter nonsense today: tyrants are not that available any longer. The distance
between us and our masters can be reduced only by the latter, which seldom
happens. A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and, by
implication, his psychological superiority, rather than his politics. A song is
a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts a doubt on more than a
concrete political system: it questions the entire existential order. And the
number of its adversaries grows proportionally.
It would be a simplification to think that it was the poem
against Stalin which brought about Mandelstam's doom. This poem, for all its
destructive power, was just a by-product of Mandelstam's treatment of the theme
of this not-so-new era. For that matter, there is a much more devastating line
in the poem called "Ariosro" written earlier the same year (1933):
"Power is repulsive as were the barber's hands..." There were others,
too. And yet I think that by themselves these mug-slapping comments wouldn't
invite the law of annihilation. The iron broom that was walking across Russia could
have missed him if he were merely a political poet or a lyrical poet slipping
into politics. After all, he got his warning (see the translator's
introduction) and he could have learned from that as many others did. But he
didn't, because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to
his ethics. It was the immense intensity of lyricism in Mandelstam's poetry
which set him apart from his contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch,
"homeless on an all-union scale." For lyricism is the ethics of language,
and the superiority of this lyricism to anything that could be achieved within
a human interplay is what makes for a work of art and lets it survive. Because
of that, the iron broom, whose purpose was the spiritual castration of the
entire populace, couldn't have missed him.
It was a case of pure polarization. Song is, after all,
restructured Time, toward which mute Space is inherently hostile. The first has
been represented by Mandelstam, the second chose the State as its weapon. There
is a certain terrifying logic in the location of that concentration camp where
Osip Mandelstam died in 1938: near Vladivostok, in the very bowels of the
state-owned Space. This is about as far as one can get from Petersburg inside
Russia. And here is how high one can get in poetry in terms of lyricism (the
poem is in memory of a woman, Olga Vaksel, who died in Sweden, and was written
while Mandelstam was living in Voronezh where he was transferred from his
previous place of exile near the Ural Mountains after having a nervous
breakdown). Just four lines:
... And
stiff swallows of round eyebrows(a)
flew(b) from
the grave to me
to tell me
they've rested enough in their(a)
cold
Stockholm bed(b).
Imagine a
four-foot amphibrach with altered (a b a b) rhyme.
This strophe is an apotheosis of restructuring Time. For one thing,
language is itself a product of past. The return of these stiff swallows
implies both the recurrent character of their presence, and/or the simile
itself, either as an intimate thought or a spoken phrase. Also, "flew ...
to me" suggests spring, returning seasons. "To tell me they've rested
enough" too suggests past, past imperfect because not attended. And then
the last line makes a full circle because the adjective "Stockholm"
exposes the hidden allusion to Hans Christian Andersen's children's story about
the wounded swallow wintering in the mole's hole, then recovering and flying home.
Every schoolboy in Russia knows this story. The conscious process of
remembering turns out to be strongly rooted in the subconscious memory and
creates a sensation of sorrow so piercing, as if this is not a suffering man we
hear, but the very voice of his wounded psyche. This kind of voice surely
clashes with everything, even with its medium's-i.e., poet’s-life. It is like
Odysseus tying himself to a mast against the call of his soul; this-and not
only the fact that Mandelstam is married-is why he is so elliptical here.
He worked in Russian poetry for thirty years, and what he did
will last as long as the Russian language exists. It will certainly outlast the
present and any subsequent regime in that country, both because of its lyricism
and its profundity. Quite frankly, I don't know anything in the poetry of the
world comparable to the revelatory quality of these four lines from his
"Verses on the Unknown Soldier," written just a year prior to his
death:
An Arabian mess and a muddle,
The light of speeds honed into a beam-
And with its slanted soles,
A ray balances on my retina...
There is
almost no grammar here but it is not a modernistic device, it is a result of an
incredible psychic acceleration, which at other times was responsible for the
breakthroughs of Job and Jeremiah. This honing of speeds is as much a self-portrait
as an incredible insight into astrophysics. What he heard at his back
"hurrying near" wasn't any "winged chariot" but his
"wolf-hound century," and he ran till there was Space. When Space
ended, he hit Time.
Joseph
Brodsky
New York,
1977
Osip
Mandelstam
LENINGRAD
Russian
1891-1938
I've come
back to my city. These are my own old tears,
my own little veins, the swollen glands of my childhood.
my own little veins, the swollen glands of my childhood.
So you're
back. Open wide. Swallow
the fish oil from the river lamps of Leningrad.
the fish oil from the river lamps of Leningrad.
Open your
eyes. Do you know this December day,
the egg yolk with the deadly tar beaten into it?
the egg yolk with the deadly tar beaten into it?
Petersburg!
I don't want to die yet!
You know my telephone numbers.
You know my telephone numbers.
Petersburg!
I've still got the addresses:
I can look up dead voices.
I can look up dead voices.
I live on
back stairs, and the bell,
torn-out nerves and all, jangles in my temples.
torn-out nerves and all, jangles in my temples.
And I wait
till morning for guests that I love,
and rattle the door in its chains.
and rattle the door in its chains.
Leningrad.
December 1930
1972,
translated with
Clarence Brown
W.S. Merwin
Clarence Brown
W.S. Merwin
I returned
to my city, familiar to tears,
to my childhood's tonsils and
varicose veins.
to my childhood's tonsils and
varicose veins.
You have
returned here-then swallow
the Leningrad street-lamps' cod-liver oil.
the Leningrad street-lamps' cod-liver oil.
Recognize
now the day of December fog
when ominous street-tar is mixed with the yolk of egg.
when ominous street-tar is mixed with the yolk of egg.
Petersburg,
I do not want to die yet
I have your telephone numbers in my head.
I have your telephone numbers in my head.
Petersburg,
I still have addresses at which
I will find the voice of the dead.
I will find the voice of the dead.
I live on a
black stair, and into my temple
strikes the doorbell, torn out with flesh.
strikes the doorbell, torn out with flesh.
And all
night long I await the dear guests,
and I jangle my fetters, the chains on the door.
and I jangle my fetters, the chains on the door.
[Osip
Mandelstam, Selected Poems,
translated by David McDuff. Cambridge: River Press,
1973, p.111] (1)
Tôi trở lại
thành phố của tôi, thân quen với những
dòng lệ,
với cơn đau thịt thừa trong cổ họng thuở ấu thơ,
và chứng chướng tĩnh mạch
Bạn đã trở về đây - vậy thì hãy nuốt
dầu đèn phố Leningrad
với cơn đau thịt thừa trong cổ họng thuở ấu thơ,
và chứng chướng tĩnh mạch
Bạn đã trở về đây - vậy thì hãy nuốt
dầu đèn phố Leningrad
Hãy nhận ra
bây giờ ngày tháng Chạp mù sương...
Petersburg, tôi chưa muốn chết
Tôi có số điện thoại của bạn ở trong đầu Petersburg,
tôi vẫn có những địa chỉ, tại đó, tôi sẽ tìm ra tiếng nói của những người đã chết...
Petersburg, tôi chưa muốn chết
Tôi có số điện thoại của bạn ở trong đầu Petersburg,
tôi vẫn có những địa chỉ, tại đó, tôi sẽ tìm ra tiếng nói của những người đã chết...
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