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Unread 03-06-2018, 11:39 AM
Aaron Poochigian Aaron Poochigian is offline
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Default Mandelstam the Prophet

I have been greatly enjoying Christian Wiman's translations of selected poems by Osip Mandelstam. This early lyric strikes me as prophetic:

Let Cities Subside To Their Names

Let cities subside to their names,
Brief meanings that flare in the ear:
Washington, London, Moscow, Rome:
Existence is our home, and is here.

Let presidents rule what they can.
Let preachers have their narrow door.
Houses and altars hallowed of man
Are houses and altars, no more.
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Unread 03-06-2018, 12:46 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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I love working to "get" a Mandelstam poem. It pays off every time. The separation of one's locus from "brief meanings that flare in the ear" moves me. The second stanza is a little more didactic but it's still powerful. It's a 20th-century metaphysical poem.

Thanks for posting this.
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Unread 03-06-2018, 03:55 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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I've got a W.S. Merwin Mandelstam I'm fond of, but that Wiman version seems very nice. The ending seems ambiguous to me - nothing more or no longer? And I wonder whether the Russian plays that game. I'll have to ask my wife.
My favorite Mandelstam is the Stalin epigram. Here's the Merwin/Brown version:

The Stalin Epigram

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.


John
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Unread 03-11-2018, 01:58 PM
Aaron Poochigian Aaron Poochigian is offline
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Here, for comparative purposes, is Wiman's translation of the "The Stalin Epigram:"

The Stalin Epigram

We live, and love, but our lives drift like mist over what we love.
Two steps we are a whisper; then, gone.

Still, we gather, we gossip, we laugh like humans,
And just like that our Kremlin gremlin comes alive:

His grubworm clutch, all oil and vile,
His deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk.

Listen: his jackhammering jackboots: even the chandelier shakes.
Look: a hairy cockroach crawls along his grin

At the cluck-cluck of turkey-lackeys, and he busts a gut
At the wobblegobble dance one does without a head.

Tweet-tweet, meow-meow, Please sir, more porridge:
He alone, his grub growing hard, goes No! goes Now! goes Boom!

Half-cocked blacksmith, he lifts from hell's hottest forge
His latest law and with it brands a breast, a groin, a brain,

And like a pig farmer who's plucked a blackberry from a vine,
Savors the sweet spurt, before he turns back to his swine.
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Unread 03-11-2018, 05:36 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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There is certainly a difference in translations. I think the word count gap is pretty wide. I know no Russian, regretfully. I do like the wobblewobbles and meow-meow in Wimans but have not idea how they connect to the original.
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Unread 03-11-2018, 06:56 PM
Ken Brownlow Ken Brownlow is offline
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The Stalin Epigram
cost him his sanity then his life, I wonder has anyone ever suffered so much for writing a poem.



Sorry, I was just thinking out loud.

Last edited by Ken Brownlow; 03-11-2018 at 06:58 PM.
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