Got the latest American Scholar this week, and settled in to read the poems. Fellow named Langdon Hammer wrote a little essay, “Hearing Mandelstam,” on the author being translated , Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet who died as a victim of Stalin. Hammer talks about the difficulties of translation, and the immediacies of living under the threat of death, as Mandelstam did. And I agree that Christian Wiman, who did the translations, brings a perfect urgency to Mandelstam’s five poems. It’s interesting to read the Mandelstam translations, and think how similar the language is to the sort of poems Wiman buys for Poetry. (from the first poem, “Tristia”): “There is, I know, a science of separation // in night’s disheveled elegies, stifled laments, // the clockwork oxen jaws…” Reminds me of some of Goldbarth’s work, the strange pairings of adjective and noun, the long sweep of the sentences, the need for the reader to pay close attention to the dense language to catch the reasons for each word: “and the barn-warm oxen slowly eat each instant.” Being from a town that in the winter is on average just slightly colder than Moscow, I focused on that “barn-warm oxen.” I feel that in my skin, the warmth in the barn with the scent of hay and urine, the cats in the corner, the cold wind as the door shuts quickly, keeping the warm inside, and the feeling of the world narrowed down to only the act of eating, of life being chewed away in this slow, eternally-repeated scene. That such could come out of just a few words is testament to the power of the translation and the original, both. Wow. That poem was from 1918. So this poem and the next, “Night Song,” from 1913 would have been at times of great change and uncertainty, with the World War looming, then just ending, and the revolution causing great tragedy in the country, and perhaps some hope. Night Song has the lines: “Wounds impossible to doctor. // Joseph, by his own blood bartered // Off to Egypt, grieved for home no harder, //Unslaked sky. Sleetlight of stars.” And with that ‘grieved for home,’ originally I thought of Joseph grieving that he is lost and wants to return home, but given the circumstance of the poem, the added meaning of grieving for a home that is damaged beyond repair, lost to him and everyone, grieving for the sorrow IT is suffering, not himself, becomes primary. ‘Sleetlight.’ What a wonderful, troublesome word. And again, sleet does glow at night in certain lights. And God a cruel master in that ‘unslaked sky.’ Tremendous essences here.
The last three poems are from 1933,35 and 37. Hammer tells us Mandelstam died in 1938, a prisoner of Stalin, so these are just before his death, and the urgency of his own personal danger looms larger in my mind. “Nowhere Air” starts: “Like water trickling from the highest ice // its bracing ache, its brain-shard sweetness… So my sigh has lost its source.” Taking the simplest of objects to him, ice water, and as its origins are lost, so too the origin of his sigh, what an incredible metaphor. The ending of the poem brings the immediate danger, the simplicity of the danger, home to the reader. He lives under the shadow of death, but has the world itself to turn to for comfort, as with “Black earth, “Earthcurds, wormdirt, worked to a rich tilth…brief, ringing kingdom — // These wet crumbs claim and proclaim my freedom.” Life will go on, the earth will go on, the struggle against oppression. Wiman has done such a marvelous job of getting out of the way of the words, bringing them forth, not making them cute beyond necessity, but stripped down, as bare as a winter’s branch: “War here is a word, work a world in which to dwell.”
And the final poem, called “The Poem,” Mandelstam’s declaration of belief in his own work, in what he was doing, in the power and importance of poetry: “White meteorite, infinity’s orphan…Supplicants, tyrants, it doesn’t matter. It IS matter…”
What a gift to be able to share in such a man’s life, through his poetry, what a reminder of our own blessings, to be past so much of that horror, what a reminder that we must continue the struggle, to avoid sliding back to those times.”
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
Related blog posts:
Missouri Review – Winter 2017
The New Yorker – Jan 22 2018
Rattle 58 – Winter 2017
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