The poetry of Osip Mandelstam
 

Since people seem interested in Mandelstam and are writing about him, I thought I'd show you some of the most beautiful prose I found on him. I normally read literary criticism like I eat KFC: as a light, slightly unhealthy break from "literature": the imagination. Like a relaxing. But this transcended that. It probably shouldn't be a surprise since Celan writes as piercingly as Emily Dickinson but this caught me off guard. I understood Mandelstam from the bottom up all over again:
https://jacket2.org/commentary/poetr...celan-complete
I hope this helps some people who are thinking about reading him. I would recommend the James Greene translations.

This hasn't had many views. Maybe the taste for Mandelstam has passed. That would be a shame.

Dear Cameron,

I'm reading the poems and they are beautiful and modern. I hope some scholars stop by with more incisive comments.

Your poems are a delectation and I like the effect the ampersands have in my reading. It is silent, understood, and almost invisible, to me. It floats me to what follows. I think of it as a way to establish pace, more than meaning. Often, if left out, the meaning would not change, though it may call for a comma.

Thank you!
~mignon

I’ve been reading this, Cam. I have translations I read also. I find myself not able to say much about his poems, which I think is what he intended. Thanks for this.

I just ordered the Greene translation.
Thanks for the tip.

Nemo

I should make more of an effort to move past Voronezh Notebooks but that sounds easier than it is.


37

When the goldfinch, in his airy confection,
Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake,
His spite sets off his scholar's robes,
Shows to advantage his cute black cap.

And he slanders the hundred bars,
Curses the sticks and perches of his prison--
And the world's turned completely inside out,
And surely there's a forest Salamanca
for birds so smart, so disobedient.

John, that’s Andrew Davis’s translation and a good one, except that he’s turned the subjects of the verbs into objects in the first two lines of the second stanza. Here’s my crib:

When the goldfinch in the airy pastry
suddenly begins to quiver, angry[?],
rage peppers the scholar’s robes,
and the cap is good-looking[?] in black.

The perch and plank slander,
the cage of hundreds of spikes/needles slanders,
and everything in the world is inside out,
and there is a forest Salamanca
for disobedient, clever birds.

It’s not the bird that’s doing the slandering. It’s not even 100% clear that the bird is angry; it depends on how you understand the first neologism, which contains the word “heart” and today is the name of a vitamin supplement for a healthy heart! Celan says the poems in Mandelstam’s first collection, Stone, are “free of neologisms.” That may be true, but it’s not true of Mandelstam in general.

A webpage devoted to Mandelstam’s neologisms has convinced me that the two in this poem are adjectives, not verbs, so I’ve revised my crib. I’m also now persuaded that the bird is angry; the poet’s wife, Nadezhda, quoted a variant of the poem in which “rage” is clearly attributed to the goldfinch.

I read an article by Davis recently. I sympathised greatly with this:
"This is Mandelstam's great gift: through a kind of synesthesia, a freak of consciousness heightened by a cultural linguistic predisposition, Mandelstam heard sense in rhyme and cadence. Sound is absorbed, and honored, as an essential vehicle of meaning, or better, as meaning itself."

And I wondered if this paragraph was spoken directly to Carl and I:
"How, then, to respond as a translator? To imitate the structure of the poetry would be to violate the essential principle of Mandelstam's prosody, which is the organic, indivisible relationship of sound and meaning. The only possible course is to obey that principle, to reimagine the poem, in a way re-hear it, in one's own language and in one's own time. Is it then so strange that the gorgeous pyrotechnics of Mandelstam's response in Russian should become, in contemporary English, a subdued, a dogged muttering?"

Are the Davis translations "dogged muttering?"

Maybe I don't want to know.

Great quote, Cameron. I’m happy to read people’s “reimaginings” of Mandelstam and try thinking that their blank or free verse or whatever is giving me the same experience that Russian readers got from his formal verse a century ago. But I feel the need of a traditional form to convey the experience of unorthodox content in orthodox forms. Mandelstam didn’t invent unique forms to embody his meaning. He worked within traditional forms inherited from nineteenth-century Russian poets, who adopted them from Western Europe. Anyone who writes an IP sonnet, as Mandelstam did a few times, is doing it in the Shakespearean (and/or Petrarchan) tradition. Do I have to ignore that and invent some new form (or lack of form) to be faithful to the originality of Mandelstam?

I agree with that Davis quote. I believe that those who object to what he is saying don't really understand what literary translation is. They don't want to think of it as something that requires artistry, talent, skill, craft, and poetic insight. They want to delude themselves into thinking that a translation is just a mechanical, ministerial exercise, not a creative act on the part of the translator, and they don't want to have to trust the aesthetic judgments and decisions of the translator (as if those judgments and decisions could be dispensed with in favor of something they would call literal).

Ultimately, much depends on what the reader of the translation is looking for. If they just want a tool that will allow them to read the original, that's one thing. But if they never intend to look at the original, and they are simply looking for the enjoyment of reading a poem that happens (now) to be written in English, it's another thing entirely.

Sorry, Roger, but I’ve already adopted Jim Ramsey’s term (which he didn’t mean to apply to me) and call myself a member of the Dead Twin School of Poetry Translation. It’s a cooler name than the Mechanical, Ministerial School.

This question reminds me strongly of one of my grandmother's (unpublished) poems:

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
(Born in 1933, Died in April 2017)

In nineteen-ninety-seven or so
at Stetson University
in Deland, Florida,
the great Russian poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(author of “Baba Yar”)
read in his native tongue
“City of No, City of Yes.”

I felt pity for the translator.
“No” has such an open sound.
How could he express
the sneering nastiness
of Yevtushenko’s “Nyet”?
The cruel word snaps its fingers
underneath your nose.
“Nyet, nyet, nyet!”

No simpler grows the task.
Our sweet-tempered “yes”
nonetheless contains a hiss.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
foresees the problem,
takes back the microphone.
“Da,” he says, consenting as a kiss.
“Da!” his audience murmurs
with international content.

[Tangerine Bell, undated draft]

I love it, Christine. A real situation illustrating the real impossibilities of translation. (Cameron likes to say that translation is both impossible and necessary.) Glad you’re upholding the family tradition.

Here is Davis' version of a poem from the Voronezhe notebooks:

Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue,
And a slow sail continued by a cloud—
I hardly knew you; I've been torn from you:
Longer than organ fugues—the sea's bitter grasses,
Fake tresses—and their long lie stinks,
My head swims with iron tenderness,
The rust gnaws bit by bit the sloping bank...
On what new sands does my head sink?
You, guttural Urals, broad-shouldered Volga lands,
Or this dead-flat plain—here are all my rights,
And, full-lunged, gotta go on breathing them.

February 4, 1937

And Here is James Greene's version:

Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue,
And the slow sail continued as a cloud –
I’m parted from you, scarcely having known your worth.
Longer than organ fugues and bitter is the twisted seaweed,
Smelling of long-contracted falsities.
My head is tipsy with the tenderness of iron
And rust gnawing gently at the sloping shore …
Why does another sand lie under my head?
You – guttural Urals, muscular Volga,
These steppes – here are all my rights, –
And I must still inhale your air with my entire lungs.
(366) 4 February 1937
Or these lines. Davis:

Like a postponed present,
That’s how winter feels —
From the first I’ve loved
Its uncertain extent.

Fear makes it beautiful,
Something terrible might occur —
Before this forestless circle
Even the crow’s lost its nerve. (44)

And Greene:

Like a belated present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like its initial,
Diffident sweep.
Its terror is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the leafless circle.
But precariously more powerful than anything
Is its bulging blueness:
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly …
(336) 29–30 December 1936

I like Davis version of this poem:

And I don’t paint, I don’t sing,
Don’t rosin the black-voiced bow:
Just empty myself into life, and love
To envy the seditious imperious wasp.

If only I, stalling sleep and death,
Could somehow, someday catch
The chirp of the air and summer warmth,
Hear the slipping earth, the slipping earth … (68)BANNED POST
And Greene's:

I neither sing, nor draw,
Nor scrape a black-voiced bow across a string:
I only sting life, and love
To envy the energy of subtle wasps.
Oh if only heat of summer, sting of air,
Could – sidestepping sleep and death –
Some day goad me into hearing
The buzz of earth, buzz of the earth.

Which, do you think are more pyrotechnical?
But I do not have the Davis. If anyone has a pdf of it, I would love for them to send it to me.

I don’t know how to gauge pyrotechnics, but here are a few comments on the latter two translations (all I have time for at the moment):

L2: M’s verb doesn’t have the harshness of “scrape,” and once he’s chosen that verb, Greene has to add “across a string” to clarify it. Davis’s “rosin,” though less literal, solves those problems and is lovely.

L3: M’s verb means something like “dig into.” (Mayakovsky used it to describe a tick digging into an ear in “Brooklyn Bridge.”) Greene’s “sting” is closer, though it implies the inflicting of pain, while Davis’s “empty myself into” opens up avenues of thought that just aren’t there in the original.

L4: A more literal translation would be “mighty, cunning wasps.” Davis’s “seditious, imperious” is too grand, and Greene’s “energy” isn’t quite right either.

L5: Davis’s “stalling” is a nice word, but “bypassing,” “skirting” or “sidestepping” is M’s meaning.

S2: Greene follows M’s grammar here, while Davis has “reimagined” the stanza, adding “catch” and “chirp” and making the N a potentially active hearer, rather than one forced to hear. (Literally, M says, “If only the goad of air … could force me to hear,” but I like the way Greene has replaced “goad … force” with “sting … goad.”)

L8: The original wording is “earth’s axis, earth’s axis.” There’s no “slipping” or “buzz,” but M is playing on the similarity between os (axis), osa (wasp) and Osya (short for Osip), so some reimagining is justified here.

As a free verse poem in English, I suppose Davis’s is more satisfying. As a translation, I vote for Greene’s. It’s closer to the original sense, and the iambic undertow throughout and hint of rhyme in S2 keep us from completely forgetting M’s form. To be fair, Davis’s more even line lengths also give a hint of formality.

To be honest, I’m unready to deal with the “belated gift” poem. Mandelstam’s grammar in S3 is all but impenetrable to me. I’m dubious of Davis’s aphoristic S3L1, but I can’t even be sure of that. I do prefer Greene’s “brow” to Davis’s “temple,” which, though more literal, sounds too much like a place of worship.

.
The name Osip Mendelstam came crashing into the Eratosphere like a meteor, thanks to David Callin's poem. A kerfuffle ensued and Cameron's staunch defense of Mendelstam's spirit caused me to pick up a copy of The Selected Poems of Osip Mendelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin and I'm glad to have it.

The artistry of literary translation is perhaps the most alchemic of all the arts. I am in awe of those who do.

.

That's the one that I have, Jim. I love it, although I suspect that Carl (politely) deplores it.

I share your awe at the necessary artistry.

David

P.S. Extra points for your exemplary use of "kerfuffle".

Yes, I deplore all the Merwin/Brown translations I haven’t read, but I’m much more positive about the one or two I’ve actually seen.

I have very mixed feelings about Merwin's Mandelstam (coupled with the fact that there is no copy accessible to me).
On the one hand, I sympathise with what Brodsky says in "Child of Civilisation" greatly. Merwin's sense of rhythm is not Mandelstamian, and, from what I know, rhythm seems everything with Mandelstam. Like Christian Wiman's work, though more insideously, they strike me as interpretation: as the conversion of one rhythm into another.
Although, I might guess that — though I attempt closer rhythmic echoes — Carl might contend that my own translations are performing a similar act.
Yet, occasionally, Merwin though he is unable to escape his rhythms seems to escape himself: annihilates himself: and inhabits something like a Mandelstamian region. Just look at the invisible connection: the implicit links and logic of association employed in the opening of Merwin's translation of "Black Earth". In some sense, that is very faithful:


Black Earth
Manured, blackened, worked to a fine tilth, combed
like a stallion’s mane, stroked under the wide air,
all the loosened ridges cast up in a single choir,
the damp crumbs of my earth and my freedom!


In the first days of plowing it’s so black it looks blue.
Here the labor without tools begins.
A thousand mounds of rumor plowed open—I see
the limits of this have no limits.


Yet the earth’s a mistake, the back of an axe;
fall at her feet, she won’t notice.
She pricks up our ears with her rotting flute,
freezes them with the wood-winds of her morning.


How good the fat earth feels on the plowshare.
How still the steppe, turned up to April.
Salutations, black earth. Courage. Keep the eye wide.
Be the dark speech of silence laboring.
— Osip Mandelstam trans. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

For those collecting translations, I just came across a selected poems translated by Ilya Bernstein, called simply "Poems", first published in 2014. The final draft of the book -- well poems anyway -- is online in pdf form here. It looks like you'll have to buy the book if you want the accompanying "extended commentary on the poems and on Mandelstam's poetics".

There's an article about the book in the LA Review of Books, which does, eventually, start to talk about the book.

Thanks, Matt. I usually warn people off translators with Russian names like Ilya because their feel for English is less than perfect. Ilya Bernstein is an exception. He came to the US at the age of nine or ten, I think, and is probably perfectly bilingual. His translations are accurate and inventive and worth reading, though Cameron prefers Greene, and I think I agree with him.

I’ve finally had time to look this over and agree that in many ways it’s a fine translation, worth studying. The opening is a reimagining—more in Roger’s line (and yours?). In the first three lines, I count four words left over from the original: “blackened,” “mane,” “air” and “choir.” (It’s actually “withers,” not “mane,” but that’s close enough.) The rest of the translation is accurate, but I’m open to the idea that the reimagined lines are more in the spirit of the original than Robert Tracy’s more accurate rendering (without “withers,” though):

All praised, all black, all cosseted and coddled,
All open air and watchfulness, all ranged in tiny hills,
All pulled apart, all organized in chorus—

I don’t have the ambition or the talent to reimagine Russian poets, though of course all translators do it to one degree or another. If I’m influenced to drift a little more in that direction, I’ll go with it.

I didn’t know there were voice recordings of Mandelstam. Here’s one (of ten), on a page for a class at Stanford, of Mandelstam reading “No, I have never been anyone’s contemporary.” Seasickness warning: most Russians chant their poems and write them to be chantable.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/slavi...gda_nichej.mp3

Thanks for these links. I’m scarfing them up.