The bronze monument to the Emperor Peter the Great which is known as the Bronze Horseman. It was erected in St. Petersburg in 1782.
*****
Alexander Pushkin • Anna Akhmatova • Marina Tsvetaeva • Boris Pasternak • Osip Mandelshtam
*****
Alexander Pushkin: Poem
translated by Seraphina Powell
THE PROPHET
Tortured by a thirst that wasn’t physical,
I forced myself to stagger forward
across a sunless desert.
An angel with six wings,
two at his shoulders, two at hips,
two at heels—a seraph, appeared to me
as I came to a crossroads.
With fingers soft as the onset of sleep
he touched my eyes. They opened
on prophetic vision—suddenly,
farseeingly wide
as those of a startled eagle.
He touched my ears, I heard
then such a roaring that they rang.
I heard how the heavens shudder,
with an inaudible thunder,
when a flock of angels rushes by on high.
I could hear the cold remote motion
of undersea beings, the soundless sound
of vines as they climb.
The seraph bent down close to my face,
tore the sly, glib, sinful tongue
from my mortal mouth,
replaced the numb teeth
in my jaw frozen open in fright,
with serpent fangs and speech
of wisdom biting deep:
such gory force
was in that angel’s hand.
As first with fear, then with sword
he clove my chest,
took out the pulsing heart.
In the gape he placed
a coal with mane of flame.
I lay on the sand like an unburied corpse,
and from heaven came resounding down,
“Stand up, prophet, see now as a seer,
act in the world as one who hears
the voice of God—travel lands,
cross seas, and heat people’s hearts
till they burn with the Word.”
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the father of Russian poetry, stands in the same pantheon position of global and untranslateable greatness as Virgil, Shakespeare and Goethe. To convey what he means to Russian poets, all of whom are great insofar as they are in dialogue with him, we cannot improve upon Akhmatova’s tribute to him from her book Evening:
ALONG THESE PATHS AND THROUGH THIS PARK
Along these paths and through this park
wandered once a swarthy young man—
his great grandfather was a nobleman from Africa
captured by the Ottoman Turks who gave him
as a present to Peter the Great.
The young man was Pushkin, who thoroughly enjoyed
his un-Russian complexion
which made him visibly as well as inwardly
an exotic breed.
Along the shores of this lake he sadly
strolled, in Byronic melancholy.
A century later we’re still thrilled to think
he, even as we, walked here,
supposing we hear in the rustle of our footsteps
among these autumn leaves
a faint echo of his.
Beneath those pines, where the roots protrude
from the thick and prickly carpeting of needles—
perhaps it was there he set down
his tricornered hat,
and a dog-eared volume of his favorite poet.
Seraphina Powell works as a freelance copy editor and proofreader, which is what one does with a humanities MA with a concentration in Russian. Her leisure is spent rummaging through second-hand bookstores and knitting sweaters for her much-blinking Sphynx cat, Casaubon—Powell is something of a George Eliot fan. Here translation of Akhmatova’s Evening and Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend are available as linked.
*****
Anna Akhmatova: Twelve Poems
translated by Seraphina Powell
Poems from Evening
THE MEMORY OF SUNLIGHT
The memory of sunlight as something warm
fades from my heart.
The first frost has already yellowed
the green from the grass.
The wind is playing, just barely,
with a few flakes.
The water in the narrow canals
is already motionless, frozen.
Nothing moves. Nothing will change.
Not ever.
The willow spreads its leafless branches
against empty sky,
like the framework of a transparent fan.
If I’d never become your wife, perhaps
things would have been better.
It’s hard to remember now how warm
the sunlight felt.The temperature drops.
Maybe it’s evening coming on. Sometimes
it seems like winter arrived overnight.
THE SONG OF THE LAST ASSIGNATION
Such a numbness overcame me—
my heart felt nothing—
yet I left, self-possessed,
rapid and deft my steps—
I did, however, attempt
to pull my left hand glove
over my right.
It was three steps down to the courtyard,
though they seemed to go on and on.
A whisper in the leaves of the maples,
asked whether I too wouldn’t like to die.
Autumn said, “I too was betrayed,
as I always am, deceived, cruelly fooled,
believing each year anew
the old, old sophistries of June.”
I answered, “Sweet season, I know,
dear dying time, I feel as you do.”
This duet was the song of my last assignation.
I stared back at his house, all dark
except for the windows of the master bedroom
where candles glowed their same yellow
as though nothing at all had changed.
ON MY KNEES AT SUNRISE
On my knees at sunrise in the vegetable patch,
humming a love song, yanking out goosefoot,
tossing the stalks: they’ve tiny clustered flowers,
velvet blue-gray leaves shaped amazingly
like real geese feet.
Forgive me, pretty weeds!
I look up: by the rustic fence
woven from branches and twigs,
a barefoot girl is crying.
Her high clear voice of painful fear
is harrowing. The scent
of the goosefoot’s murdered stems
gets more intense in the sun-warmed air.
“What man is there of you, who, if his son
ask bread, will he give him a stone?”
That’s the hard prize my deliberate deafness
will earn me. Above, there’s only cloudless sky,
and all I can hear is that little girl’s cry.
I WANDERED HERE WITHOUT MEANING TO
I wandered here, without meaning to.
A girl with nothing to do,
I could just as well not do it here
by the motionless mill
on a sleepy little hillock.
I don’t need to say anything,
not now, maybe not ever.
It’s August, over a wilting morning glory
a bee swims gently through the air.
I salute the rusalka, the naiad of the mill pond—
the souls of girls who drown themselves
because of being jilted, because of cruel husbands,
or on account of unwelcome pregnancies—
girls for whom water seemed to offer
a less cruel solution—these become rusalki,
sometimes playful, sometimes dangerous,
nixies of fertility, strongest in spring—
but it seems the spirit mistress of this particular pond
has passed away.
A rust-colored slime
has overspread her waters, formerly wide,
now shallow and shrunk from a whole summer’s heat.
A moon glitters in the blue
above the yellow, flickering leaves
of the trembling aspen.
I notice everything now,
it all seems somehow new.
The humid wind through the trees
reeks of moisture. I’m silent, a part
of this soundless place, I’m ready
to cease being and return to you, earth,
to let my estranged nature be reabsorbed
into the strangeness of nature.
EVENING IN MY ROOM
I say now such things
as one’s only able to say
soundlessly to one’s own soul,
things that perhaps one ought not even think.
Now—while a lost bee drones around
the vase of pallid chrysanthemums,
under the impression
he’s yet in a meadow—in this stuffy room
oppressively scented by dried flowers, herbs
and spices in sachets embalming
my linens in wardrobe and chest;
I recall, and relive, and rehearse such words,
to myself alone, in this narrow room
with its too-little window, this room that holds
the memory of love, remembers,
without penitence, times gone by—
despite the framed embroidered motto
hanging over the bed, asking God’s mercy
in fine round-lettered calligraphic French,
“No,” I say to my soul, “Don’t even touch this,
don’t seek out hints, or sad last traces
of that story so old it feels like a fable!”
The glossy cloaks of the brilliantly
tinted Sèvres figurines
grow dull with day’s waning.
A last sunbeam falls
from the little window, yellow and heavy, catches
the richly tinted bouquet of dahlias,
traps them in its amber.
As in in a dream, I hear the sound
of someone’s violin,
and tentative notes on the harpsichord.
FISHERMAN
Your sleeves are rolled up to the elbows;
your eyes are bluer than ice;
the strong, the overwhelming smell of tar
from your fishnets becomes you
as does your laborer’s tan.
The collar of your blue work shirt
is always, always open,
a couple of buttons undone;
the fisherwomen stare and sigh
and blush at what they find themselves thinking.
Even that girl of thirteen
who pushes a barrow of fish through the streets—
come evening, she wanders
out on the cape
as though she were lost.
Her face is drawn, her arms feel weak,
her eyes are sunken and dull.
She stands there, looking out to sea,
so long, so still, the crabs grow bold,
crawl out, one even climbs
over her foot.
She doesn’t notice its tickling,
much less does she now
reach out a hand to catch it;
the blood is thudding in her head: she’s hurt,
her body aches with craving
*
Poems from Rosary
NEW YEAR’S EVE AT THGE STRAY DOG CAFÉ
In the Stray Dog, a cellar café
on Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Square,
an after-hours club where young artists and poets
celebrate their lack of celebrity—
“Nothing but a bunch of drunks and sluts!”
Yes, that would be us,
happily unhappy together.
To make up for the lack of a view
the walls have been painted
with sad, flat flowers and birds
that make the sky seem even more unreachable.
You’re smoking that black pipe you like;
smoke erupts from its bowl,
your own small strange conflagration.
I’m wearing a black pencil skirt,
to italicize for you how slender I am.
The windows of this cellar are even with the street,
they don’t, were never meant to, open;
soot-gray, opaque, they don’t betray
whether frost or storm waits without.
You’re scanning the crowd tonight
with the calculating eyes of a bird-watching cat.
Oh my heart hurts with yearning.
Like a condemned man, I know what’s coming.
That girl who knows you’re watching her dance
has no idea she’s on her way to hell.
WE MET FOR THE LAST TIME
We met then for the last time
on the Neva’s red granite embankment,
there, where we’d always met.
The river was rising, the city
feared an autumn flood.
He remarked that the summer was over,
Petersburg’s nightless days
would turn back into dayless nights.
And he said this too, that the whole idea
of a woman writing poetry
was ridiculous. I looked up
at the Winter Palace, mint-green
and ice-white, a perpendicular cliff
of baroque too-muchness mirrored in the river,
and across from it the Fortress of Peter and Paul,
a flat brick asterisk of bastions,
island garrison and political prison—
the Russian Bastille facing the Russian Versailles—
I recalled where I was, in all this Petersburg,
which is its own world, like a planet,
with its own atmosphere that has nothing to do
with earthlings such as us—I felt that,
and I felt that just to be there
was a godsend, a little miracle.
That hour vouchsafed me a new awareness
and this last mad anthem
of our twisted, finished, love.
I’VE LEARNED THE ART OF LIVING SIMPLY
I’ve learned the art of living simply, wisely,
how to look up at the sky and feel grateful to God,
to set out on aimless afternoon strolls
long enough before nightfall so that there’ll be time
to walk off and wear away all my needless worries.
Late summer. The branch stalks of the burdock,
with their spikey purple flowers, big thistly weeds,
have gotten tall. They rustle in the wind
through the ravine; orange-red berry clusters
hang down amid the rowan tree’s leaves;
I write blissful poems, ripened,
sweetened by the season,
about this so brief, so beautiful life.
I get back to the house. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs its winning, unfeigned affection.
I can see, across the lake, the smokestack of the saw-mill.
The furnace for the steam engine powering its blades
throws sparks and embers
that glow the smoke
so it looks, as day darkens,
like a turret with a plume of fire.
At long intervals I hear dividing
the silence the cry of a stork returning roofwards
to nest for the night.
I’m so deep in these reveries,
I don’t know I’d even hear it
if you knocked.
THIS HOUSE HAS A GOOD SMELL
This house has the good smell
of living flowers and fine old wood;
in the garden, vine vegetables loll,
colorful, on the black earth.
Sometimes the wind still flows cold,
but it’s summer enough that they’ve unwrapped
the burlap from the sensitive plants
in the greenhouse. There’s a little pond too,
the kind of still pond algae overspreads
with its green and gold brocade.
A little boy tells me, in a scared excited whisper,
that a giant carp lives at the bottom of that pond
with his giant
carp
wife!
“IT JUST HURTS!”
“It just hurts!” —that’s what the boy told me.
I felt sorry for him. He was still just a boy.
A moment ago, he’d been pleased with his life,
he only knew heartache from hearsay;
and now he knows everything
the rest of you learned long ago.
The stars in his eyes have dimmed,
his glance is downward and dull.
I know he can’t cope with the pain
hurting keenly as only first love can.
He holds and strokes my hands,
helplessly hoping still,
as though this could warm them or me.
THE HIGH ARCHING VAULT
The high arching vault of the Polish Catholic church
is a truer, more vivid blue
than the actual sky;
forgive me, merry boy,
for being your cause of death.
It was the roses you gathered for me
in the ornamental garden,
it was your stupid letters,
it was the way your confident, healthy face
grew pale and thin, how you couldn’t
look me in the eye, the way
you became a living cliché—
I thought, “This is all for show,
he’s pretending to be a grown man.”
I thought, “Boy that he is, how could he fall
for an old tired whore like me
as he would for some virgin girl?”
I was colder to you than the weather,
and winter was coming on.
Not cold enough.
You were already so far gone
that you stalked me implacably,
your grim gaze on me everywhere,
all the time.
It seemed you collected, treasured
each hint of my disinterest. I’m sorry!
Why did you vow so perverse a penance,
such an artful martyrdom?
Death met you halfway. Tell me,
what did you find in the end?
I never guessed that beneath your blue collar
you already wore the noose.
Forgive me, that once you were happy,
that you turned out to be
such a hurt little bird!
It was hard, coming here to your church for farewell,
it’s worse now, heading home.
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. She is best known for her poetic record of life under the Stalinist terror. The selections here are from her first two books, Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914). Already by 1905, the catastrophic defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and the “Bloody Sunday” armed repression of peaceful protest made the revolution only a question of “when.” In these poems we already see the clarity and realism that defined Akhmatova’s style, and can feel the sense of impending apocalypse that then pervaded Russian culture.
*****
Marina Tsvetaeva: Seven Poems
translated by Seraphina Powell
from the Girlfriend Cycle
1
Are you happy? You won’t say.
Just barely? That’s good.
If you’ve kissed so many
that you’ve sickened of love,
none of them can have been the one.
I see in you all of Shakespeare’s heroines,
now Desdemona, now Lady Macbeth,
yours is the tragic grandeur of a woman
no man will save.
You’re tired of repeating a love recitative
that never soars into aria;
there’s a man’s wedding ring
on your pale hand, unlovely and cold
as a wagon wheel’s cast-iron rim,
—and this says everything.
I love you, for the way you walk proud
under a storm-cloud of disapproval,
for the way that’s given your wit
corrosive bitterness,
because you’re so much better than them all.
I love you precisely because our lives
took such different directions.
How not? Neither knew where we were going.
But you lure me now like a brilliant inspiration
that can’t end well.
I love you, demon with the lofty thoughtful brow,
because I feel so guilty
that, even though I should die trying,
you don’t want to be saved!
I love you for the way you make me tremble,
I wonder, did I dream you? Are you even real?
I love the erotic irony,
that you are and aren’t what you seem,
that you can be so magically handsome
without being a he.
2
I wake in the plush caress of your blankets,
into something I dreamed yesterday—
Which was? Whose the conquest?
Which one of us won,
which one was won?
As I think it over, I think perhaps
I should think the better of all of this.
Sudden as a pang, it all comes back.
Why don’t I even have a name for this feeling?
Does that mean it’s love?
Which one of us was the trapper,
who was the prize, the prey?
Everything’s looking-glass backwards,
impossible to read,
much less say.
Which one of us was sure, as a man is sure,
that she understood,
slowly purring with satisfaction
like a Siberian tomcat?
Who won that championship game of wills?
When the whistle ended the match,
was anyone even holding the ball?
Was it your heart or mine
that beat fast as the wings
of a terrified bird,
and hard as the hooves
of a galloping horse?
What really happened? I still don’t understand
Do I burn with longing or shame?
Who took, who was taken, did anyone
have the last word?
5
It was eight o’clock in the evening
on Bolshoi Lubyanka Street
right in the middle of Moscow;
a sled fled headlong past, shot fast
as ever thrown snowball.
Clarion laughter. I spun to see
and what I saw froze me:
a tall woman, with red hair richer than fur,
close enough to touch—it was you.
You’d already found another best friend,
were racing away with her in a sleigh—
someone dearer, who thrilled you more deeply,
whom you loved more than me.
The pair of you shouting, enthralled
by wind and speed, and I saw
how you swept the fur travel rug
over her shoulders, gathered it snug,
—I thought I’d choke—
Oh, je n’en puis plus, j’étouffe!
a feeling I both repressed and expressed
by recourse to decorous French.
The world was wide and glad, evening—
a dark exciting door to adventures!
You two hurtled off into snowstorm;
your treasures, collected that afternoon shopping,
slipped from your muffs to the floor of the sleigh
unnoticed, you snuggled together,
nesting, fur on fur, like ferrets,
looking deep in one another’s eyes . . .
My heart made cruel red revolution
within, while snow fell in flakes big and white
as breadcrumbs. For a second or two,
no more than that, I stared after
while I stroked the long soft nap
of my own shaggy furs, grooming myself
like an unconcerned cat.
It took me just two seconds
to stop caring. I was like Kai
in Andersen’s tale, like Kai
when the Snow Queen turned his eyes and heart
cold and clear as ice—as truth—
he shivered to see how ugly and mean
everyone really is.
The Snow Queen stole Kai away in her sleigh,
with a freezing kiss, she numbed his heart
to the girl he once loved—
I’m your cold Kai,
O Snow Queen mine.
9
I wouldn’t dare suggest a direction,
or even take your hand:
you go your own way in the world—
but I long for you with a yearning eternal—
it’s not infatuation, you’re not my first girl.
The second I saw you, my heart told me, “Her!”
You could do no wrong, I forgave in advance,
and at random, anything you’d ever done.
Before I even knew your name,
all I knew was I loved you,
I hoped you could love me.
I see in the near-sneering curve of your lip
defiance and pride;
how nobly you furrow your high genius brow;
these bespeak a heart
that never backs down from a fight!
Your silk dress gleams like dark armor,
the slight Jewish lilt in your speech
makes your words seem even more
exotic and deep.
Everything about you
makes me so happy it hurts,
your unconventional beauty too—
not beautiful so much as handsome,
no delicate flower that wilts in the heat,
you’re all steely, elegant stem;
meaner than mean at need,
sharp as the bite of a spice.
What hot sun hatched you,
what ship brought you back
from what sultry West Indian isle?
You’re equally singular, just as unsettling,
whether you brandish a fan
or a gentleman’s silver-topped cane;
it’s blood-deep, bone-certain in you, who you are,
right down to the tips of your long wicked fingers:
girl-tenderness weirdly at one
with a brashness as butch as a boy’s.
I’m not scared to announce
what this means for us,
what you mean to me:
you with the brow of a Beethoven,
beautiful stranger I’m poet enough
to ward with a word or a verse
all the world’s scorn and its smirks.
*
from Poems Written in Exile
I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LOSE
I know what is it to lose one’s country.
The glamor and the bafflement of exile have passed.
The fact laid bare: I don’t care where I am.
Loneliness only
is my homeland now.
Does it matter what strange pavements I wander
clutching my sad little grocery bag,
back to a building that, like a hospital
or a barracks, could never be anyone’s home,
a place on which one leaves no trace,
that never knew you were there?
How should I care about my whereabouts
any more than a lion in a zoo
notes which faces watch her pace the cage,
captive hackles raised.
Red, reactionary—
can I care which group excludes me,
drives me off, like always, into an inner world
peopled only by my feelings?
A Siberian bear, hunted from her glacier,
it’s all one to me who I fail to get along with
(or that I don’t even try),
Reduced to begging, do I care where?
I’m unseduced by the sound of Russian
calling to me with maternal sweetness
in the voice of a fellow-exile. What’s it matter
in what language I can’t be understood?
Here’s someone eager to speak, to ease
their indigestion, having greedily nursed
at the bosom of Mother Russia’s
expatriate press—pap of hopes and hearsay
“But you have to keep up with what’s happening!”
Go then, read your Times,
leave me to read the timeless.
I’m unmoved by news. Stunned and dumb
as a single tree-stump
left from the treelined approach
to an aristocrat’s sacked mansion
in my land where all’s been flattened
under an awful equality—
My history’s gone, every date effaced,
no more landmarks, no direction,
it’s like a single hand sufficed wiped it away.
I have no name, the place I was born
apparently never existed.
The frontiers failed and faded,
nothing defines me, and now not even
the most acute agent of the Soviet secret police
could find an incriminating trace
of nation staining my soul.
Every building feels weird to me now;
every church is empty, God turned out.
Nothing now’s not dully one
—unless perhaps, by the side of the road
I see a rowan, that pagan Slavic tree,
magic and old before all history,
a tree that stands for a Russian eternity
even here, and even for me.
A HORN LIKE ROLAND’S
I tell the tale of my isolated, orphaned state
elliptically,
as a sensitive hunchbacked court jester
might allude to his cruel deformity.
Behind every prince is his royal clan;
behind every seraph, all the rest
of the heavenly host;
behind everyman, thousands like himself
so he knows that if he staggers back
he’ll be stayed by a living wall.
And should he fall, thousands are ready
to take his place.
A private stands tall, knowing
he represents a regiment;
a demon’s proud of that dark legion
he’s part of; the thief
always knows he can disappear
into a rabble no better than he,
and the afore-mentioned court jester,
in a weird way,
knows he can count on his hump.
Thus, ultimately weary woman that I am,
I hold on by sheer force of conscious will,
my steadfast finger points because there’s yet direction,
and I fight forward, bent down against a headwind
of ignorant whistles and liberal, educated laughter,
one out of so many, and for the many—most
when going against the many.
Thus Roland, with his lost, last battalion
in that crag passage through the Pyrenees
held out against a whole jihad,
so the Muslim horde, though by it he died,
should not pass into France.
Roland blew his almighty horn,
standing there terrific, petrific, immobile
as a stone colossus, roaring loud
as a jet plane for take-off
that fly from there he never would—
a call through the unenthralled and empty heavens,
the fire alive in his chest the pledge
that there would somewhere
a Charlemagne hear you, horn!
*
from the Disciple Cycle
2
There comes to one a certain hour
when we rise above our pride, cast it aside
like baggage we’ve carried long enough.
The hour one becomes a disciple—
exalted hour, coming but once,
the hour when you can’t evade your own triumph,
when there’s no place to hide from God but in God.
You’ve set down your weapons
at the feet of the one who was pointed out:
the indicating finger insisted,
you didn’t resist. You traded warrior’s glory
for a nomad’s camel,
set sail upon a different kind sea:
the unmapped sands of prophetic desert.
This high hour summons not to pitiful activity,
but to deeds, it calls with exalting voice;
this hour extricates from all the hours
that made up your self-willed days.
This is the hour that makes you bend
as the grain’s ripe ear bends—
beneath its own weight.
The harvest is ready. The hour sounds,
the wheat is eager to feel the millstone.
The Law, the Law! God’s given Torah!
(I eagerly accepted this spiritual yoke
while yet I slept in my mother’s womb;
it called, I longed, while yet in her body,
to embody this, to feel it shape my clay.)
This is the hour of consecration,
The world you’ve seen, considered ,wholly known,
appears in so different a light; now’s your time,
while dawn’s yet flaring its early first.
Abruptly comes the holy hour
when you, the disciple, chosen, choose
utmost loneliness!
If Akhmatova was the tragic Shakespeare of modern Russian poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was its ranting, roaring Christopher Marlowe. In exile from Revolutionary Russia from 1922-1939, she ultimately hung herself in a private protest against life under Stalin. Equally at odds with Reds and reactionaries, she was equally hard to categorize as to sexual preference, as her 1914-15 cycle of lesbian poems, Girlfriend attests. Tsvetaeva wrote in her own poetic idiom that veered from street slang to Old Church Slavonic, begemmed with her own coinages. Her verse leaps in a rhythm of ellipses, as though she were sending telegrams from the outer limits of possible experience.
*****
Boris Pasternak: Ten Poems
translated by Belinda Cooke
TO THE MEMORY OF MARINA TSVETAEVA
Frowning the day drags.
The river streams inconsolably
along the porch before the open door
and into my open windows.
Beyond the fences along the road
floods the municipal garden,
collapsed like animals in a den
clouds lie in disorder.
The book haunts me in bad weather
about the earth and her beauty.
I draw a forest cone
for you on the title page.
Ah Marina, for a long time
work has not been good.
Your ashes thrown in requiem
I shall carry from Elabuga.
The work of your transportation,
I have been thinking about in the past year,
over the snows of the empty stretch of river
when the long boats winter on the ice.
It’s so difficult for me since that time
to imagine you dying
like a million misers
among your starving sisters.
What shall I do to please you?
Somehow give me news about this.
In the silence of your departure
there is an unspoken reproach.
There are always puzzling traits.
I struggle to no purpose
in my futile attempts to fine an answer.
Death leaves no marks.
Here there are only half words and shadows,
slips of the tongue and self-deception,
and only faith in resurrection
provides some kind of point.
Winter is like luxurious funeral feasts:
stealthily I leave the house
to add to the twilight currents
to spill wine down onto the Kasha.
Apple trees and snow drifts before the house,
the town in a snowy shroud,
your enormous epitaph
seemed to me as the whole year.
Turning one’s face to God
you drag yourself towards him from the earth,
as in those earlier days when here
on earth life just did not add up.
HE DROWSY GARDEN OVERFLOWS WITH BEETLES
The drowsy garden overflows with beetles
like bronze ashes from a brazier.
There before me by candle light
blossoming worlds are hanging.
As if into some obscure religion
I cross over into this night
where the grey decaying poplar
has veiled this moonlit boundary:
where the pond reveals itself like a secret
where the surf of the apple trees whispers,
where the garden hangs like an out-building
and holds the sky before itself.
TODAY WE EXECUTE HIS SADNESS –
Today we execute his sadness –
so, the meetings judged me correctly,
This is how the darkness of the benches was,
and the window with its dream of azaleas in disarray.
This is how the porch was, how friends were,
and the number of the fated house
when sadness and I met below,
joint travellers on such a journey.
Forming a strange avant-garde, life walked in the rear.
The yards drowned in the debris. Spring was put on trial for burglary.
People walked to vespers, and without a thought,
March mowed down the church porches.
And all things fed off each other:
roofs lifted and houses spread
and the gangway sank before us.
WHEN THE POETS FASTEN THEIR GAZE
When poets fasten their gaze,
beyond the labyrinth of lyres
the Indus unfurls to the left
the Euphrates to the right.
And in the middle between this and that
with a terrible simplicity
according to the legend supported by Eden
he stirs up his trunk-like formation.
He will rise above newcomers
and will proclaim: my son!
With a historical face
I entered the family of forests.
I – am the light. I am famous in that
I cast my own shadow.
I – am the life of the earth, its zenith,
its beginning day.
DREAM
I dreamed of autumn in the half-light of the windows,
your friends and you in their fools’ crowd,
and, like the falcon from the sky, having got some blood
the heart descended down onto your hand.
But time passed and grew old, and died away,
and from the garden, dawn poured over
the silvering tapestry frame,
with the bloody tears of September.
But time passed and grew old. And brittle
as ice, the armchair silk crackled and melted.
Suddenly, you stumbled loudly and then were quiet,
and like the resounding of a bell the dream fell silent.
I woke up. The dawn was a dark as autumn,
and like straw raining down from a racing cart,
the wind moving away carried
the ridge of birches running along the sky.
MUSHROOMING
We trudge after mushrooms.
Road. Forest. Ditches.
Road posts
to the right and to the left.
From the wide road
we walk into the dark forest.
Our ankles in dew
we stray in all directions.
And the sun under the bushes
on milk-agaric and coral milky caps
through thickets of dark,
throws light from the edge of the forest.
The mushroom hides behind a stump,
on the stump sits a bird.
Our shadow—to us is a landmark
so we don’t lose the way.
But in September the time
is measured so scantily,
that the sunset scarcely reaches us
through the thicket.
Stuffed little baskets,
topped to the brim.
More than half
are cap mushrooms.
We walk away. Behind our back—
the motionless forest like a wall
where the day in the beauty of the land
suddenly burned down.
HAYSTACKS
Crimson dragonflies soaring about,
bumblebees fly in every direction.
Farm workers laugh from the cart
as they pass with haymakers’ scythes.
While the weather is good
they pull and stir the forage
till sunset. They pile it into
haystacks the size of a house.
The haystack takes on the look
of an inn, where night
lies down on the benches
in the mowed down clover.
Towards morning when the darkness is less,
the stack rises like a hayloft,
in which the moon buried itself,
passing over night.
With the first sign of light, cart after cart
rolls over the meadow in the dark.
He who has met the day rises from sleep
with dust and hay in his hair.
But at mid-day once more the heights turn blue,
the haystacks are like clouds
or like vodka made milky by aniseed:
the earth is sweet-scented and strong
THE ALLEY OF LIMES
Gates with their semicircular arc.
Hills, meadows, forests, fields of oats.
Within the fence—the dark and cold of a park
and a house of incredible beauty.
One after the other, the spreading limes
partially block out the heights:
there, in a twilight of alleys—
they celebrate their 200 year jubilee.
They close above into a vault
while below, the lawns and flowerbed
intersect directly
with their regular walks.
Under limes, like a cave
there is no point of brightness in the sand,
and only the tunnel opening
brightens the exit in the distance.
But here comes the days of flowering,
and limes in the belt of the fence
along with shadow scatter
an irresistible aroma.
Walking in summer hats
whoever passes breathes
this smell, unfathomable
to all but the bees.
In these moments when he
takes it to heart, he compiles
the subject and contents of a book
which park and flowerbeds bind.
On the old cumbersome tree,
hanging on the house,
blossoms lit by rain
burn with dripped wax.
WHEN THE WEATHER CLEARS UP
Big lake like a dish
beyond it an accumulation of clouds
piled up like a white heap
of severe mountainous blocks of ice.
As far as shifts of illumination go
even as the forest changes colouring,
everything burns in black shadow,
is covered as soft settled soot.
When at the end of rainy days
blueness shows through between the clouds,
how festive the sky is in the breaks,
how full is celebration in the grass.
Having cleared the distance, the sun
quietens down. The sun spilled over
the earth, green illumines the leaves,
like a painting in stained glass.
In a series of church windows
we see saints, monks, tsars.
In the shimmering crowns of sleeplessness
we see eternity from the inside.
The space of the earth is like the interior
of a cathedral and through the window
I am sometimes given the chance to hear
the far echo of the choir.
Nature, world, hiding place of the universe,
trembling in sacred awe,
in tears of happiness
I defend your long days of service.
BACCHANALIA
Town. Winter sky.
Darkness. Arched gates.
at Boris and Gleb it’s lit up
and a service is going on.
The brows of worshippers,
chasubles, and old women’s cloaks
are all weakly lit by the
the candle flames below.
But on the street there is a snowstorm
where everything became a blur,
making it impossible for
friends to find one another.
Everything was drowning in
the howling of the snowstorm:
the prison, excavators, cranes
new construction, houses.
Remnants of the repertoire
are advertised on the billboard,
and the boulevard trees
create a silvery fretwork.
And every step acts as
a footprint of this great era,
in the crush, in the confusion,
the tyre marks in the snow.
The changing times is written
on our shattered faces
in our dear friends,
in the clouds of masts and antennae,
on walls, in clothes,
on unadorned simplicity,
in the conversations and thoughts,
of our dear ones,
and in the significance of
this double life: which seems
so wretched yet made great
by our power to endure.
Boris Pasternak (1890 – 1960). From his first collection, My Sister, Life (1917) onwards was adored in the Soviet Union, but he was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago and due to Stalinist censorship was often limited to working as a translator. His early poetry expresses a euphoric, pantheistic merging of self and nature, which is difficult to convey in translation, given its free association and rich reliance of onomatopoeia. His later poems are more direct and accessible. Like Akhmatova, he opted not to emigrate but, also like her, had thus to suffer the vagaries of Stalin’s exploitation of writers as ‘engineers of the soul’.
Belinda Cooke is a widely published poet, translator and reviewer. This includes seven collections, including translations from both Russian and Kazakh. Best known for her translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, she has also written a prose memoir of her mother’s life: From the Back of Beyond to Westland Row: a Mayo Woman’s Story (The High Window Press, 2022). Her latest collection, The Days of the ShorthandShovelists, is due out from Salmon Poetry this year.
*****
Osip Mandelshtam: Eight Poems
translated by Alistair Noon
BRILLIANT, THE WAY OUR LIFE’S TURNED OUT
Brilliant, the way our life’s turned out,
comrade blessed with a supersized mouth…
Watch our tobacco crumble to bits,
my nutcracking friend at the end of your wits!
If I could get some more nut tart in,
or whistle my life away like a starling…
That’s one more plan I doubt will hit.
October 1930
Note: An earlier version of this translation appeared in Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station. Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2018).
THE NIGHT’S GOBBLED UP THE SPIKED FISH THAT ROVE
The night’s gobbled up the spiked fish that rove
police-issue paper, all bright and wirewove.
The stars alive in those pages are rapptors,
clerical songbirds whose typewriter clatters
away with reports. However they blink,
they’ll always record the thought you think,
touting their warrant, forever extended,
to twinkle and scribble, be smouldering embers.
October 1930
KEEP STILL DON’T TELL THEM YOUR TALE
Keep still, don’t tell them your tale,
don’t say what you saw, forget
every bird, old woman or jail
that’s ever sailed into your head:
if your lips so much as give
just slightly, then you’ll be taken,
like a spruce at dawn’s offensive,
by a kind of delicate shaking.
Just think of the osipping wasp
at the dacha, or else the ink
in your pencil case, or the forest
whose berries you never did pick.
October 1930
THERE ONCE WAS A JEWISH MUSICIAN
There once was a Jewish musician
called Alexander Herzovich.
Perfection was his mission,
be the notes of a high or a low pitch.
The rapture filling his soul,
he’d be at the Schubert again
all day, as he drilled his holes
in that twenty-carat gem,
working away ever harder –
not even stopping for lunch –
on that eternal sonata
until, until it would crunch.
Hey, Alexander Cardiovich,
it’s already dark on the street.
Yes you, Alexander No-Glitch!
Come on, admit defeat,
let a sweet Italian go
after old Franz instead,
skim over that crunching snow
on her far daintier sled.
We’ll still go out with a bang,
with our favourite tunes to close,
although our fur coats hang
up there, on pegs, for the crows…
Oh Alexander Herzovich,
how long our heads have spun…
Come on, Alexander Scherzovich!
Keep up there! We’re not done!
27 March 1931
A TOAST TO FANCY FUR COATS …
A toast to fancy fur coats, to the asters the military wore,
to the bile of Petersburg, asthma, and all they’ve attacked me for,
the fumes of the Champs-Élysées and the pines whose song was Savoy’s.
A toast to Parisian oils and to roses that drive a Rolls Royce,
to Biscay’s waves, and cream in an Alpine jug, no less,
to distant colonies’ quinine, the red-haired English snobbess.
A toast, a toast, but I’m in two minds as to whether to dampen
my lips with a Chateauneuf-du-Pape or an Asti Spumante.
11 April 1931
WE LIKE TO BE HYPOCRITES
We like to be hypocrites,
smoothly forgetting
that when we were kids
we were nearer to death.
A child at her saucer
is cross she was woken.
But who, on my walks,
can I sulk at? There’s no one.
Flesh moults and fish play
without light, without air –
it’s twisted, the way
we obsess and despair.
14 May 1932
THE SPRING IS COLD …
The spring is cold. No bread. The cowed Crimea
no more at fault than when it was in Wrangel’s hands.
Patches on sackcloths. Petals clump across the land.
The same sour acrid wafts of smoke appear.
The pale horizons now are just as pretty,
the buds have swollen here, a few at least.
But trees hang round like strangers: as at Easter,
baubles adorn the almond tree that calls for pity.
Now nature wouldn’t notice its own face
among the fearful ghosts from Ukraine and Kuban.
On earth that’s turned to felt, the starving farmers
don’t touch the iron rings that guard their gates.
Summer 1933
Moscow. After the Crimea
THEY’RE SILENT AS PAPER, THESE QUARTERS
They’re silent as paper, these quarters
now ours, devoid of invention;
in the iron pipes, the waters
gurgle about the bends.
The phone’s as still as a frog,
the fixtures are all in good order,
but our poor battered belongings
want out of this crumbling mortar,
the walls so thin they’d betray
a cockroach. We’re trapped at home.
Idiot! Ordered to play
an insidious tune on a comb,
contracted now to instil
some brash new Komsomol song,
some student crudeness, in killers
on benches, who’ll twitter along…
They’re rationed, these books I’ve been reading,
cheap hemp, these speeches I’ve caught,
harsh lullabies I’m repeating
to collective farms’ new landlords.
Someone who’d sketch you a bedspring,
who combs the collective’s flax
as blood dilutes his ink,
could do with one of these traps.
Some good old honest informer,
dissolved, like salt, in a purge,
with a wife and kids to support,
should be the moths’ new scourge.
And every latent fact
contains the torturous spite
of Nekrasov’s hammer that whacked
the final nail in tight.
Let’s lay our heads on the block,
if late by seventy years.
You scruff! Your boots can knock
their reports out now, right here!
No Hippocrene spring spouts forth:
instead, a terror long felt
will burst in these shoddy walls
where Muscovites fear to dwell.
November 1933
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) grew up in St. Petersburg and published his first book, Stone, in 1913. One more volume followed before he began encountering publishing difficulties in the Soviet Union, as Stalin consolidated his power (the poems printed here date from that period). As well as poetry, he wrote prose and children’s verse, and also translated (chiefly from French), if largely as a necessity rather than a passion. Sentenced in 1934 to three years of internal exile, he was re-arrested in 1938 and deported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in a Gulag transit camp.
Alistair Noon’s translations of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in three volumes from Shearsman Books – Concert at a Railway Station (a Selected Poems, 2018), The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems (both 2022) – as well as in The New Statesman and The Guardian. Publications of his own poetry include Paradise Takeaway, a long poem with Luton Airport in it (Two Rivers Press, 2023). He lives in Berlin.
The High Window 