[Carl Copeland]

Heaviness, tenderness—sisters—your marks are the same.
The wasps and honeybees suck on a heavy red rose.
Man dies. The warm sand slowly cools, and yesterday’s sun
is borne on a high black bier to its place of repose.

Ah, heavy the honeycombs, tender the meshes that snare;
it’s easier lifting a stone than repeating your name!
In all of the world, there is left to me only one care,
a golden care: to be rid of the burden of time.

The air that I drink is like water, dark-clouded and cool.
Time is turned up by the plow, and the rose was once earth.
Heaviness-tenderness weaves, in a slow-whirling pool,
of heavy and tender roses a twofold wreath!


Edits
S1L4: solemn > raised > high; final > place of
S3L11: pool > pool,


Original

Сестры тяжесть и нежность, одинаковы ваши приметы.
Медуницы и осы тяжелую розу сосут.
Человек умирает. Песок остывает согретый,
И вчерашнее солнце на черных носилках несут.

Ах, тяжелые соты и нежные сети,
Легче камень поднять, чем имя твое повторить!
У меня остается одна забота на свете:
Золотая забота, как времени бремя избыть.

Словно темную воду, я пью помутившийся воздух.
Время вспахано плугом, и роза землею была.
В медленном водовороте тяжелые, нежные розы,
Розы тяжесть и нежность в двойные венки заплела!


Crib

Sisters heaviness and tenderness, your signs/marks are identical.
Bees and wasps suck a heavy rose.
A person dies. The warmed sand cools,
and yesterday’s sun is borne on a black bier.

Ah, the heavy [honey]combs and tender nets;
it’s easier to lift a stone than to repeat your name!*
I have one care remaining in the world:
a golden care, how to get rid of the burden of time.

As if dark water, I drink the turbid air.
Time has been turned up by the plow, and the rose was earth.
In a slow whirlpool, heaviness and tenderness
has twined** heavy, tender roses into double wreaths!


* Mandelstam’s original version of this line, “It’s easier to lift a stone than to utter the word to love,” was mocked by Nikolai Gumilev and others as grammatically awkward. After several publishings, Mandelstam adopted Gumilev’s suggested alternative.

** The singular verb is a grammatical oddity, apparently treating “heaviness and tenderness” as a singular compound subject.

[David Callin]

Hi Carl,

I think this Merwin / Brown version is so good that I've transcribed the whole thing, in case there's anything of use to you here, before engaging any further with your translation. (I must say that yours is truly a translation, whereas theirs is only a version. And I'm assuming that you still don't have the Selected Poems by them that I have.)

Heaviness and tenderness - sisters: the same features.
Bees and wasps suck the heavy rose.
Man dies, heat leaves the sand, the sun
of yesterday is borne on a black stretcher.

Oh the heavy honeycomb, the tender webs - easier
to hoist a stone than to say your name!
Only one purpose is left me, but it is golden:
to free myself of the burden, time.

I drink the roiled air like a dark water.
Time has been plowed; the rose was earth. In a slow
whirlpool the heavy tender roses,
rose heaviness, rose tenderness, are plaited in double wreaths.

Now to yours!

David

[David Callin]

First thought: it looks as though, in order to keep to your chosen metre, you've had to add quite a few modifiers. I suppose there's no other way round that?

David

[Carl Copeland]

Thanks, David! No, I still don’t have the Merwin/Brown translations. It’s not so much a matter of indolence or indigence (though they too play a part), but I live in an isolated part of the world, and the last two times I ordered books from abroad, they were swallowed by a black hole. (That’s why I’m still hesitant about the kind offer you made me months ago.)

This Merwin/Brown “version” certainly qualifies as a translation in my book. The last two lines aren’t perfectly accurate, but the fractured Russian grammar in that spot demands a little improvising.

Puffiness is a constant danger in metrical translations. Here I’ve added a few words for the rhyme in each stanza: “to its final repose,” “that snare,” “and cool.” Beyond that, I’ve added “red,” “slowly,” and “solemn” in S1. If that stanza sounds puffy, I could replace “solemn black bier” with “bier of black.” Mandelstam has a few short feet of his own, so I don’t suppose these would be out of line. On the other hand, you “stumbled” over a short foot in the Villon poem …

[David Callin]

Okay, does it work as a poem in English?

I think there's a definite hiccup in L3. It's that damn full stop, and what it does to the following sentence (but that's faithful to the original?). And I think L10 jars a little too.

The puffiness you mention is fairly evident throughout, but I imagine it's unavoidable collateral damage if you're trying to be faithful to the rhythm of the original - and, apart from those two points, I think you've done that really well. (I can't read Russian, so I am assuming you've followed it faithfully.) The last two lines are obviously (to me) supposed to be virtuosic, and you've been pretty virtuoso-like there.

Is this a poem from the Crimea? It feels like that to me, in my ignorance of the Crimea. (I think it's the sand and the roses. Days of sand and roses.)

One final point: do you think (like me) that Merwin / Brown's use of "hoist" rather than "lift" is brilliant? Lifting a stone doesn't sound that difficult a job (depending on how big it is). Hoisting a stone suggests a pretty big stone, and a pretty difficult task.

Cheers

David

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by David Callin

Okay, does it work as a poem in English?

Thanks again, David. That’s what I want to know.

Originally Posted by David Callin

I think there's a definite hiccup in L3. It's that damn full stop, and what it does to the following sentence (but that's faithful to the original?). And I think L10 jars a little too.

The full stop is Mandelstam’s, but his is closer to the middle of the line. I could try shifting it a little to the right, but I’m not sure that would cure the hiccup for you. L10 is headless and starts with a stress, like the two lines beginning with “Heaviness.” If that’s what’s jarring you, what would you think about:

As time is turned up by the plow, so the rose was once earth.

I’m not sure the explicit analogy is justified, but it’s a version I considered.

Originally Posted by David Callin

Is this a poem from the Crimea? It feels like that to me, in my ignorance of the Crimea. (I think it's the sand and the roses. Days of sand and roses.)

I didn’t even think about that, but your feeling is on target. The poem was written in March 1920 in Koktebel on the Black Sea coast of Crimea. The area was still under White control at the time.

Originally Posted by David Callin

One final point: do you think (like me) that Merwin / Brown's use of "hoist" rather than "lift" is brilliant? Lifting a stone doesn't sound that difficult a job (depending on how big it is). Hoisting a stone suggests a pretty big stone, and a pretty difficult task.

I think I considered “hoist,” since it does add the desired heaviness, but I don’t care for it in my version, maybe because for me it implies some specific task: hoisting it into place, etc. I was tempted to convey heaviness with the word “rock,” but “stone”—the English title of Mandelstam’s first collection—is a word firmly associated with him in English.

[John Riley]

My impression of this is that it's one of his early poems. The line translated as "is borne on a solemn black bier to its final repose" is so flat and bad. Nothing like the work of his I've read before. When I read Mandelstam I'm reading a poet who squeezed and squeezed his words and lines. This pressure means more to him than accessibility. I know nothing of what he may have said about his work but I'm reading a poet who is more concerned about what makes something happen than he is revealing what happens when it comes apart. To me, and probably only me, he's a 20th-century physics poet. Compress, compress, compress until it explodes, or better yet, be on the verge of exploding.

That sounds stupid but it fits how I think of his work. I don't see so much of that here. There are attempts "Heaviness-tenderness weaves" but it's followed by "tender roses." I don't think the roses would have been tender in his later poems--"a golden care: to be rid of the burden of time." "Burden of time" in a Mandelstam poem is a little sad and says to me he's still working on becoming Mandelstam.

I haven't said much about the translation. I don't know how much I'm correct about the Russian. If I'm not then this is a terrible job of translating, but I know from your other translations that isn't likely to be the problem.

Am I right about this being an early poem?

[Carl Copeland]

Thanks, John. I guess you’d have to call this a middle-period poem, written when Mandelstam was 29 and published in Tristia. It forms part of what Yuri Levin calls a “Crimean-Hellenic cycle,” which also includes “O take from my extended palms in gladness.”

“Tender roses” and “burden of time” are Mandelstam’s, but I’ll have to take responsibility for L4, since it’s the line where I’ve added the most for the meter and rhyme. Mandelstam’s wording is simpler: “and yesterday’s sun is borne on a black bier. “Rose” in L2 simply cries out for the rhyming “repose,” but there may yet be a way of squeezing out “solemn.” It’s useful to know that you find this line so weak.

Your impression of Mandelstam’s verse as highly condensed is generally true, especially in the later period, but there are also times when he seems to be going for a classical elegance and, as here, using anapests as a substitute for classical dactyls. The classical feel relies on the meter, and preserving that in English usually requires a little padding, but I’m grateful to be told where I’ve crossed the line into excessive and/or conspicuous padding.

Here’s a quote from Ryszard Przybylski that may, or may not, shed light:

“Mandelstam did not catalogue allegorical roses. He did not overuse the name of the flower in vain, and above all he loved only one symbolic rose – the rose of time. Why is his rose of time heavy? The two unusual sisters from the first line, heaviness and tenderness, when they live apart, unjointed by the knot of art, usually reside in Mandelstam’s world in two completely different spheres. Tenderness lives in the other world, among the souls of the dead. In Mandelstam’s poems the kingdom of Persephone is always tender, light, sensitive; the Elysian Fields are a meadow of tenderness, which is compatible with Virgil’s version; the River Styx is the water of tenderness. It is true that the lips of women are also tender, but we know that he sought in them the taste of death. On the other hand, the second sister, heaviness, lives in the four-dimensional world of time and space. … And thus the heavy rose symbolizes in Mandelstam the heaviness of life, the burden of human time. One must also remember that art, always represented by the sisters heaviness and tenderness, connects these two spheres: the tender world of the dead and heavy world of the living.” (Przybylski, Ryszard. An Essay on the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: God’s Grateful Guest. Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987.)

[Andrew Frisardi]

I’ve been enjoying reading your Mandelstam translations, Carl, as well as the Musing on Mastery thread on him. I’ve read Mandelstam in someone’s translation—it might have been the Merwin but I’m not sure—but it was a while ago and I can’t say I’ve registered a vivid impression of him. A poet-friend of mine who was an old man when I met him translated all of Mandelstam back in the 1950s, and even had a contract to publish the translations, but lost it all in a fire. We contemporary translators have it easier with the cloud. ;-)

I think your translation of this poem works very well. The rhythm is audible but fluid, the language fresh, and you’ve been faithful to the original. You’ve also done nicely with the rhymes and off-rhymes or lack of rhyming (I’m eyeing the Cyrillic for the rhymes, not knowing Russian . . . )

Some padding in metrical translation is unavoidable, and I like your inventiveness in adding it inconspicuously. There are a few spots in this piece where I felt it stuck out more:

Line 4’s “to its place of repose” works for me, while “all in black” seems either overdone or inaccurate: the setting sun isn’t in black yet, since that would be night. The image, like the sand cooling, is of decrease before it’s completed. The black finishes it too much. I can’t think of an alternative but there’s bound to be something.

Line 9: “dark-clouded” seems a little forced, and not as evocative as “turbid.” If you make the simile a direct metaphor, you might try something like, “The air that I drink is dark water, so turbid and cool.”

Lines 11-12 lose (if I’m reading your crib right) the sense of heaviness-tenderness themselves making a wreath of tender roses:

Heaviness-tenderness weaves, in a slow-whirling pool
of heavy and tender roses, a twofold wreath!

That seems a crucial image here: the flower of woven contrasts (very Blakean!).

I also think the verb tense has to stay in the past, to match the previous lines (actually, you have “Time is turned up by the plow”; would this work as “Time’s been turned up by the plow”?). The note of nostalgia and culmination at the end leans on the past.

One other thing: line 12 clunks a little at the end to my ear, losing the rhythm with “twofold”

A possible revision here could be:

Heaviness-tenderness has twined in a whirling pool
my heavy and tender roses, a binary wreath!

I hope some of my comments are useful to you. It’s fun learning Mandelstam from your translations and thinking about the craft of them.

I’ll be back for more, when I have a chance.


Andrew

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

A poet-friend of mine who was an old man when I met him translated all of Mandelstam back in the 1950s, and even had a contract to publish the translations, but lost it all in a fire.

He translated 500 poems? And lost them all? My brain isn’t computing either of these inputs.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

You’ve also done nicely with the rhymes and off-rhymes or lack of rhyming (I’m eyeing the Cyrillic for the rhymes, not knowing Russian . . . )

It’s actually fully rhymed, but you’re right about the off-rhymes: воздух/розы is much slantier than Mandelstam usually gets. He’s no formal innovator.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Line 4’s “to its place of repose” works for me, while “all in black” seems either overdone or inaccurate: the setting sun isn’t in black yet, since that would be night.

It’s the bier that’s black, not the sun, though it does recall the black sun in an earlier Mandelstam poem. I’m not yet sure what to do about this line, which others too have fingered as weak. You’ve got me worrying about it again (always a good thing).

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Line 9: “dark-clouded” seems a little forced, and not as evocative as “turbid.” If you make the simile a direct metaphor, you might try something like, “The air that I drink is dark water, so turbid and cool.”

“Dark-clouded” is actually grammatically closer to the original, which is a participle in Russian: muddied, clouded, obscured. I took “turbid” for the crib from someone else’s translation. It’s not a word in my active vocabulary, so if I’d read it somewhere I would have registered only a vague sense of what it was about. It does seem very appropriate, though, so I’ll think more on it.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Lines 11-12 lose (if I’m reading your crib right) the sense of heaviness-tenderness themselves making a wreath of tender roses … That seems a crucial image here: the flower of woven contrasts (very Blakean!).

You’re right, and it is crucial. You mean, then, that in my translation heaviness-tenderness is weaving a twofold wreath of who knows what in a pool of heavy and tender roses. If that’s what comes across, something does need to be done, and while I’m at it, I may as well fine-tune the tenses. These are all valuable observations.

I like your suggested revisions and may well incorporate them in one form or another. First I have to decide whether I can swallow the three consecutive unstressed syllables in “tenderness has twined.” One respected Spherean would insist that “ness” in this case gets promoted, adding an extra foot to the line, though I suspect a triple non-stress can squeak by on occasion. Also, “binary,” while filling out the meter nicely, just sounds too scientific to me.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

I’ll be back for more, when I have a chance.

Please, please. I turn green with envy when people tell me how bubbling with activity this forum used to be. I’ve never actually gotten zero response to a post, but I often come close. Today, in David Callin’s words, it’s the Sphere’s Siberia.

I didn’t realize at first who you were, Andrew. I became rather obsessed with Dante a few years ago, though I don’t read Italian, and your name came up frequently in my wanderings through the Danteweb. It’s an honor to make your acquaintance.

Carl