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
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