On Ovid and Mendalstam
From Neil Ascherson’s book: Black Sea
Many readers find Tristia absurd, a wall of self-pity and self-obsession.
But there is much more to Tristia than complaint. Even if Ovid’s life there cannot have been the uninterrupted misery he proclaimed, everything he wrote from Tomi was a plea for remission of sentence, lamentation designed to arouse pity in Augustus…
…ventriloquising as feigned experience all the horrors and discomfits which a cultivated Roman reader would imagine to accompany ‘life among the barbarians’.
In the first book, of Tristia, Ovid remembers the last long sleepless night at home, the bewilderment about what clothes or luggage to take with him in the morning, his wife in tears, the stricken household slaves standing about.
It was this passage which Osip Mendalstam had in mind when he wrote his own marvellous ‘Tristia’ in 1920. At one level, Mendalstam seems to be anticipating his own end in the Soviet Tomi of Stalin’s labour camps. There the voice is Ovidian and mourning. But then secret joy, un-Latin, unexplainable, begins to rise up as if a forced parting were also rebirth into an unknown land.
I have studied the science of saying goodbye
in bareheaded laments at night.
Oxen chew, and the waiting stretches out,
it is the last hour of my keeping watch in this city,
and I respect the ritual of the cock-loud night,
when, lifting their load of sorrow for the journey,
eyes red from weeping have peered into the distance,
and the crying of women mingled with the Muses singing . . .
Who can know when he hears the sound of goodbye
what kind of separation lies before us . . .?
Tristia
by Osip Mandelstam
I have studied the Science of departures,
in nightâ€s sorrows, when a womanâ€s hair falls down.
The oxen chew, thereâ€s the waiting, pure,
in the last hours of vigil in the town,
and I reverence nightâ€s ritual cock-crowing,
when reddened eyes lift sorrowâ€s load and choose
to stare at distance, and a womanâ€s crying
is mingled with the singing of the Muse.
Who knows, when the word ‘departure†is spoken
what kind of separation is at hand,
or of what that cock-crow is a token,
when a fire on the Acropolis lights the ground,
and why at the dawning of a new life,
when the ox chews lazily in its stall,
the cock, the herald of the new life,
flaps his wings on the city wall?
I like the monotony of spinning,
the shuttle moves to and fro,
the spindle hums. Look, barefoot Deliaâ€s running
to meet you, like swansdown on the road!
How threadbare the language of joyâ€s game,
how meagre the foundation of our life!
Everything was, and is repeated again:
itâ€s the flash of recognition brings delight.
So be it: on a dish of clean earthenware,
like a flattened squirrelâ€s pelt, a shape,
forms a small, transparent figure, where
a girlâ€s face bends to gaze at the waxâ€s fate.
Not for us to prophesy, Erebus, Brother of Night:
Wax is for women: Bronze is for men.
Our fate is only given in fight,
to die by divination is given to them.
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