Mandelstam, ‘Lately I’m held …’

Lately I’m held in a spiderweb of light,
In its black hair, its light-brown hair.
The people need light and blue air,
And need bread and the snow of Elbrus.

No-one here to counsel me,
No hope of finding this -
There are no such transparent, weeping stones,
In the Crimea or the Urals.

The people need a verse secret and familiar,
So they may be wakened by it endlessly,
And in the sound of its flax-curled wave,
Its chestnut wave, wash themselves utterly.

Osip Mandelstam, 19 January 1937

line 1: ‘nynche‘ is ‘now’ in the sense of ‘nowadays’ so ‘lately’ seems better than the usual ‘now’.
line 9: a verse: this preserves an ambiguity in the original, where it is unclear whether the people need a single secret verse to waken to, or a body of verse. familiar preserves the ‘family’ sense of ‘rodnoi‘ though another way to render this would be ‘close’ or ‘intimate’.
lines 11-12: ‘flax-curled … chestnut wave’ echoes the ‘black hair’ and ‘light-brown’ of line two. Why is the hair so indeterminant in colour? And the wave is indeterminant in kind (sound is not what we associate with waves of hair). The word order of the final lines is closer to “and in its flax-curled, chestnut, wave – / its sound – bathe themselves.”

Mayakovskiy, ‘Still Petersburg’

Scraps of the ball still ring in my ears,
and from the north, greyer than snow,
the fog, with a cannibal’s bloodthirsty face,
chews up the nasty-tasting people.

The hours loom up and swear in my face,
after six o’clock, it’s bloody seven.
The miserable clouds look pompously down
like Lev fucking Tolstoy, from heaven.

Vladimir Mayakovskiy, 1914

Akhmatova, “I am not her …”

I am not her, prince. I am not
The one you desire to see.
From my lips have long fallen
Not kisses, but prophecies.

Do not think that in delirium,
Tormented by grief,
I bewail my misfortunes:
It’s just my trade.

And I can teach
The unexpected to occur,
So one you desire in passing
Falls for you, tamed, for ever.

Or is it fame you want?
Just ask and I’ll tell you …
Only see that it’s a trap:
There’s no joy, no light in it.

Well, run along home now,
And forget about our meeting.
And for your sin, my dear,
I will answer before heaven.

Anna Akhmatova, May 1915


l.3-4: Lit. long has my mouth / not kissed, but prophesied.
l.8-12: Lit. But I can teach / so that the unexpected happens, / how to tame for ever / the one you love in passing.
l.13 Or glory.
l.20 Lit. I will answer before the Lord.. The stress, of course, is on the contrast: I will answer for your sin.

Mandelstam, “I love the frosted breath”

I love the frosted breath,
The acknowledgement in winter’s steam –
I am I, reality is reality.

And a boy, red as a lantern,
Sovereign-chieftan of his sledge,
Hurtles sprawling past

And despite my quarrel with world and will,
I fall with a sudden sledge-sickness –
In its silvery parentheses, in its tassels,

The age could fall lighter than a squirrel,
Lighter than a squirrel, into the soft stream,
The sky half-masked by boots and legs.

Osip Mandelstam, 24 January 1937

The third line in Russian, ya – eto ya, yav’ – eto yav’ mimics the sound of exhalation, and another translation of the poem (R & E McKane) uses the conventional English exhalant-syllable, ah to render this: Ah. I am I. Reality is reality. You could, perhaps mimic the original rhyme-scheme in the first two lines, with I love the frosted exhalation, / Winter steam’s realisation but as ever, over-rhyming can sound a little twee in English where it does not in Russian.

Line 8: ‘infected by the sledge’s freedom’, maybe? ‘Fall with a sudden sledge sickness’ is perhaps not just justified by the original, but seems to allow the two last stanzas to flow into each other.

Line 9: v skobkakh does seem to imply textual parentheses, and I think this is referring to the sledge-runners. I can’t see that rendering it as ‘brackets’, which is possible, helps – despite the co-incidence of metallic structures / textual brackets, as runners and brackets are different things.

Lines 10-11: ‘vekshi’, I am informed by the search engine, is an archaic word for squirrel. And also, unhelpfully, but interestingly, a medieval coin, named by a literal currency conversion rather than by analogy, after squirrel pelts, which were used as currency in old Rus. See here and here. Vekshi is also used in the Russian bible for Judas’s pieces of silver. Then again, every other translation I could find has ‘squirrel’ and they must know something. My grammar is a little shaky here, is the ending on vekshi a singular accusative animate squirrel, or a plural accusative inanimate coin? Do squirrels fall lightly into streams? Might they not, rather, try to avoid the experience, and make a loud splash? Coins are light, aren’t they? So I like the sound of this, no-doubt wrong, alternative:

The age could fall lighter than pieces of silver,
Lighter than silver coin, into the soft stream

The last line, word for word, seems to resist comprehension. Half the sky in boots, in legs? ‘In boots’ suggests straight away ‘wearing boots’ and most translations, in fact, seem to follow this, but I can’t square this with ‘in legs’ – we don’t ‘wear’ our legs, after all. I’ve also seen ‘high cloud boots’ (valenki are the felt winter boots worn by Russian peasants, and therefore a bit fluffy). Here my informant suggested that ‘half the sky in boots, in legs’ could imply a view looking up at the sky from low down, through the legs of passers-by, half the sky ‘full of legs’. Since the boy on the sledge is sprawling low to the ground, suddenly the thing seems not so obscure at all, and in fact the last line pulls the whole poem together rather than, as seemed originally, going off at a tangent. There is then a single movement in the lines from start to finish. This may involve too much ‘domestication’ of the strangeness of the original, but I can’t see any other interpretation making sense.

Mandelstam, ‘Do not compare’

Do not compare: what lives, defeats comparison.
I felt fear’s caress, and so consented
To the plains’ plainness,
And the sky’s circle confined me like a sickness.

I turned to the servant-air,
Awaiting service, awaiting news,
Prepared to sail away, but drifting in an arc
Of unbegun journeys.

Under a larger sky – there I would wander,
But bright weariness will not let me leave
These still-young Voronezh hills
For all humanity’s hills, growing brighter in Tuscany.

Osip Mandelstam, 18 January 1937

Lines 2-4: literally, ‘with a sort of tender fright / I consented to the plains’ even flatness / and the sky’s circle for me was a sickness’ [with the sense of a chronic infirmity]. Laskovym (tender) is related to laska, ‘caress’. The phrase ‘I felt fear’s caress’ is an attempt then to convey both the ‘caress’ in laskovym and the suddenness and intimacy of ‘fright’ without resorting to ‘tender fright’, which sounds weak in English. It is rare that a pun can transfer neatly from Russian to English, but to render ravenstvom ravnin as ‘plains’ plainness’ seems too good an opportunity to miss, even if ‘plainness’ is not quite the same as the evenness (or featurelessness?) implied by ravenstvo. In line 4, ‘confined’ is maybe too much interpretation, but seems to be one way in which a ‘circle’ can be ‘for me an infirmity’ and contrasts with the ‘larger sky’ he desires, in the first line of the last stanza. It also fits with the ‘circle’ imagery of other poems of Mandelstam’s exile such as ‘Bound to Koltsov’.

Line 7: ‘drifting in an arc’ is hard to interpret. Originally I had ‘floating off’ but the movement is not going anywhere. However, to replace the ‘arc’ with something like ‘back and forth’ would be too much domestication and loses the strangeness of the original.

Line 9: more literally: ‘where there is a bigger sky – there I am ready to wander’.

Line 10 and line 12: I am not sure any translation can manage to convey properly the echo of line 10’s yasnaya toska (‘bright, or lucid, weariness, or despair’) into line 12’s yasneyushim v Toskane (‘growing brighter – or clearer – in Tuscany’). In these last three words, apart from the surface image of mist lifting and light on Tuscan hills, the undertone is growing more lucid in despair – which is one of the main themes running through all this sequence of poems written in late 1936 and early 1937, such as ‘Precious yeast of the world’ and ‘Still not dead’.

Yasnaya toska is one of the many paradoxes, or anti-collocations that Mandelstam uses. Sumptuous poverty, powerful destitution, blind man and guide.

Mandelstam, “Into the face of the frost”

Alone I look into the face of the frost -
It goes nowhere, I come from nowhere,
And all is ironed flat, the creaseless
Breathing miracle of the plains.

In starched poverty the sun is squinting,
Its squint is calm and consoled.
Ten forests, ten more … almost alike …
Snow crunches in your eyes, like pure sinless bread.

Osip Mandelstam, 16 January 1937

There is a choice between Into the face of the frost I look alone which preserves the word order of the original, and Alone I look into the face of the frost which preserves the three beat line, in fact I think the whole metre of the original line. This seems slightly stronger.

It is hardly possible to render the economy of the second line without adding verbs in English (On – nikuda, ya – niotkuda. lit. “It – to nowhere. I – from nowhere”)

I chose creaseless for a hint of ceaseless.

Desyatiznachnie lesa is hard to grasp. “Ten digit” forests? “Tenfold” forests? Having travelled up a road into the Siberian taiga near Krasnoyarsk once, stopped and looked around at the endlessness, I think I know the feeling, an eerie and unsettling one (‘so much of it, thousands of miles and all the same’ – a kind of horizontal vertigo). Though M was probably writing about the rather different forests of European Russia.

Spokoen i uteshen ‘calm and consoled’ appears also in “You are still not dead, still not alone”, which bears the same date. Also bezgreshen, sinless or innocent: the bread in this poem, the ‘sweet-voiced work’ in that poem.

The laundry metaphor of ironed plains continues into the starched poverty of the sun’s squint. A strange image I can’t make sense of, though low winter sun and snow will make you squint. There is something appealing about interpreting the ‘starched poverty’ as a description of the ironed flat, featureless plain, which would allow in English the very different:

The sun squints at this poor starched world,
Its squint is calm and consoled.

This would be more immediately comprehensible and naturalised in English, and even more musical, and joins all the ends up, but the grammar of the original does not seem to quite allow it, so we return to the more difficult, enigmatic image of the sun ‘squinting in starched poverty’, rather than at it.

Mandelstam, ‘Stalin Epigram’

We live: not feeling beneath us the clay,
Our words die to silence ten paces away,
But where we can shape muttered words into air
Always the Kremlin highlander’s there …
His fingers are greasy as grubs, well-fed,
His words irrefutable weights of grey lead,
His cockroach moustaches laughing,
And his boot-tops gleaming …

Our leaders around him, all scrawny necks,
The half-men he toys with, dangles and mocks,
One whistling, one mewing, one snorting and grunting,
He alone thundering, prodding, tormenting …
He hammers, like horseshoes, decrees on decrees
Into groins, into foreheads, into brows, into eyes,
And savours, like a berry, each death-sentence taste,
Broad and capacious his Ossetian chest.

Osip Mandelstam, November 1933


This notorious poem led directly to Mandelstam’s arrest, exile in Cherdyn and, later, Voronezh, and eventual imprisonment and death. It has been called a suicide note. It was not written down by Mandelstam, but was recited in company, and passed by word of mouth. (Mandelstam composed in his head, and only commited to paper once a poem was complete. In this case it was too dangerous to commit to paper at all, although he did under interrogation.)

It seemed necessary to retain the mocking, epigrammatic tone by retaining the rhyming couplets (in the translation, often half-rhyming). This inevitably involves doing some violence to the literal sense of the original.

l.1: the clay literally not feeling the land beneath us.
l.2: lit. our speech at ten paces is not heard
l.3: enigmatically: where there is enough for half a conversation; enough of what (interlocutors, willpower, courage?) is not specified.
l.4: pripomnyat kremlevskogo gortsa: the Kremlin highlander is brought to mind. I have stuck with most translators in going for ‘highlander’ over the second meaning of gorets, ‘mountaineer’ which one commentator claims suggests Stalin’s ascent to the top of a pile of bodies – this seems to take interpretation too far, though both meanings are probably at play. One translator even adds a whole line ‘murderer, peasant killer’ after ‘highlander’, which is nowhere in the original*. The epithet ‘highlander’ chimes with ‘Ossetian’ later on. There is more than a hint of Russian intelligentsia prejudice about barbarians from the Caucasus here. Another translation trying to carry the double meaning into English, ‘mountain-man’, suggests physical bulk, and despite propagandist projections of the (physically short) Stalin as a superman, introduces a third meaning far from the core ones of ‘gorets’ in Russian.
l.6: I’m not particularly happy with my rendering of this line, distorted by the addition of ‘lead’ to make a rhyme. The original ‘words, like [two-stone] weights, are verny‘ – with the idea of incontrovertible truth, and mundanely, officially sanctioned ‘true weights’.
l.7-8 have three beats in the original, whereas lines 1-6 have four. I have followed this shortening in the first stanza, but not the second.
l.9-10: ‘leaders’ seems ironic in the circumstances. Short of adding inverted commas, ‘Our’ leaders seems to allow this interpretation. Line 10 is literally ‘he toys with the services of these half-men’: ‘dangles and mocks’ is an elaboration, but is consistent with both the ‘toy’ idea and accounts of life at Stalin’s court (in the senses of ritual humiliation and ‘dangling’ over an abyss).
l. 11: ‘snorting and grunting’ translates one word ‘khnychet’, for the sake of the rhythm.
l.12: ‘babachit i tychet’. ‘Babachit’ seems to be a coinage, onamatopaeically it could be ‘babbles’ or ‘thunders’: the second seems more fitting. ‘Tychet’ has the sense of probing, or ‘poking around in hidden places to find something’, so again I have felt justified in translating it as two verbs: ‘prodding, tormenting’.
l.15-16: Literally An execution is for him just … a raspberry / And broad is the chest of the Ossetian. . Most translators have the idea of a punishment as a tasty morsel or treat. Adding ‘capacious’ is maybe an interpretation too far, but is the only way I can make sense of the ‘broad chest’ comment.
*3 Feb 2011: or so I thought when I wrote this. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, ‘Hope Against Hope’ (Atheneum, 1970), which I began reading after this translation and blog post confirms that lines 3 & 4 did read, in an earlier version, ‘All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / Murderer and peasant slayer’ – so not an extra line, which is what I saw on an online translation, but an alternative. N.M confirms that the earlier version (‘peasant slayer’) was the one Mandelstam was arrested for and which he was confronted with by his interrogator after writing down the later version. I have not seen the Russian version of these lines. N.M did not write the Stalin poem in full anywhere in her memoirs. In the judicial context of the time, of course, the difference between the two versions is purely academic: people were shot for much less; though it is rumoured that Stalin liked the poem – for its portrayal of him being surrounded with feeble-minded second-raters in the second stanza, probably – and felt that Mandelstam understood him. The famous phone conversation with Pasternak is suggestive of this. STALIN: “But he’s a genius isn’t he?” PASTERNAK: “Can we meet to talk?” STALIN: “About what?” PASTERNAK: “About life and death” (Stalin hangs up).

Akhmatova, “I don’t know if you’re living or dead”

I don’t know if you’re living or dead.
Shall I look for you on the earth,
Or only in evening thoughts
Light grief’s candle for the departed?

All for you: the daily prayer,
Insomnia’s numbing heat,
And the white flock of my poems
And the blue fire of my eyes.

I have let no other get so within.
I have let no other so torment me.
Even he, who betrayed me to torment,
Even he, who caressed and forgot.

Anna Akhmatova, July 1915

The most difficult lines prove to be 3 & 4: Ili tolko v vecherney dume / Po usopchem svetlo gorevat’. Literally: Or only in evening thought / For the deceased brightly (?) grieve.

The problem is with svetlo which apart from connotations of light, carries connotations of ‘blessedness’, ‘holiness’, which are probably the dominant ones when collocated with mourning (v svetloy pamyat’, ‘in blessed memory’). Brightly and lightly then are wrong in English – too cheerful. Grief’s candle, then, is not in the original, but is a way to combine the sense of a little light with the sense of a religious mourning ritual.

In lines 7 & 8, the flexibility of Russian word order is seen, which places the powerful images at the end of the line: literally And of my poems a white flock / And of my eyes a blue fire. Word order like this is normal in Russian, which is liberated by inflections from too many syntactic constraints, but I think sounds archaic or flowery in less-inflected English. The word for fire, pozhar, is the one used for a destructive house-fire, rather than a comforting hearth-fire.

I originally had line 9 down as I have let no other get this close.. But this is too conversational and domestic – and not close enough: sokrovenniy contains the meanings ‘concealed, secret, innermost’.

Tsvetaeva, “I am the page …”

I am the page for your pen,
Accepting everything. A white page.
Keeper of your chattels,
Returning them a hundredfold.

I am the land. Its black earth.
To me you are the sun’s rays, the rain’s wetness.
You are lord and master, and I -
Black earth and white paper.

Marina Tsvetaeva, 10 July 1918

Tsvetaeva is a master of concision and the concentrated power of ellipsis: there is something in common with Emily Dickinson.

It is hard for a contemporary reader to find the poem’s apparently submissive sentiments appealing. On the other hand, perhps this is not as problematic it seems at first, since the whole long tradition of love poetry (from men as from women) also expresses powerlessness and self-annihiliation in the face of a loved one, and the words of Tsevetaeva’s poem allow for both sincere self-denial, and a more bitter, ironic, or resentful reading. ‘Lord and master’ certainly grates – but considering the date of the poem, and how lords and masters had just been, in Russia, disinherited of power (built, perhaps, out of the ‘black earth’ and the labour that tilled it), there is room for readings to multiply …

Akhmatova, ‘Dream’

I could not fall asleep, knowing
That you were dreaming me.
The misted light of the lantern
Glowed bluer, showing me the way.

You saw the Tsarina’s garden,
The ornate white palace,
The black scrollwork railings,
The echoing stone porches.

You could not find the way,
Thinking “Quicker, quicker -
If only I could find her -
And not wake before we meet.”

“Where are you going?” the watchman
Shouted at the red gate.
Ice cracked and splintered,
Water turned black underfoot.

“The lake,” you thought,
“And on the lake, an island …”
And then out of the darkness
You glimpsed a blue spark.

Waking into the harsh light
Of a meagre day, you moaned
And for the first time
Called me loudly by name.

Anna Akhmatova, 15 March 1915

Akhmatova uses a wide range of sonic techniques, like Mandelstam, though her poems are less of an echo-chamber and there is much less ambiguity and enigma. You always know more or less what she’s talking about. She places herself in the centre of things and her poems are full of spotlit personal drama: Mandelstam by contrast seems often to want to dissolve his personality entirely in the stuff of the poem. Mandelstam has always appealed more to austere modernists in the Western tradition than Akhmatova.

The original of ‘Dream’ rhymes ABAB. The dream-feel of the narrative works in freer metre in English: there is a dream-like sense of a pursuit with unexpected obstacles, but not necessarily a coherent narrative (at what point does the pursuer cross onto the frozen lake, for example, or does he just find himself there?). In English, rhymes would probably feel a bit trite: the closed-off-ness would subtract from the randomness of the dream. (Of course , I can’t make it rhyme anyway).