Disjecta Membra: Some Notes on Mandelstam
Poems from the second Voronezh notebook (December 1936–February 1937)
By Osip Mandelstam
Translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich
This is the law of the grove of pine:
Harps and viols ringing as one.
The boughs are sinuous, exposed
Yet, harps and viols, even so
Grow as if Aeolus, the wind,
Had begun to bend each bough,
But, feeling sorry for the roots, pitying
Each branch and effort, he roused
Instead the viol and the harp
To sound — browning — in the bark.
December 16–18, 1936
* * *
Your pupil, circled by heaven’s rind,
Sheltered by the faltering of frail,
All-sensing lashes — it turns down,
After gazing far away.
May it — presently made god-like —
Live a long life in its native land.
Startled maelstrom of the eye —
Toss it here, to catch me if it can.
Toward fleeting centuries it gazes,
Already willing, eager to go.
Bright, cheerful, bodiless, fleshless,
Beseeching — at least for now.
January 2, 1937
* * *
Yeasts of the world, dearest yeasts:
Sounds, tears, works and toils —
The raining downbeat’s stress
Of troubles coming to a boil.
And the squandered sonic loss —
From what ore to be restored?
In paupered memory, a first —
You sense blind furrows, dents
Filled with copper water, in the mud —
And you track them, step by step,
Unknown and loathsome to yourself,
Both the blind man and the guide.
January 12–18, 1937
* * *
These days I’m in a spider’s web of light —
Light-blond and raven-haired —
The people need the light, the sky-blue air,
The bread and snow of Elbrus’s heights.
No one to chat with who might offer counsel,
And no way I can find it on my own:
Such stones as these translucent, weeping stones —
Found nowhere in Crimea, nor the Urals.
The people need a verse mysteriously-native
By which they would be stirred eternally awake
And in whose wave — flax-curled and chestnut —
And in whose sound — they’d bathe.
January 19, 1937
Some Notes on Mandelstam (1981)
By Philippe Jaccottet
Translated from the French by Andrew Christopher Green
I was washing at night out in the yard—.
the heavens glowing with rough stars.
A star-beam like salt upon an axe,
the water barrel brimful and cold.
A padlock makes the gate secure,
and conscience gives sternness to the earth—
hard to find a standard anywhere
purer than the truth of new-made cloth.
A star melts in the barrel like salt,
and the ice-cold water is blacker still,
death is more pure, disaster saltier
and earth more truthful and more terrible.
Translated by Peter France
I think the first poem I read by Mandelstam was this poem from 1921 that begins with the verse: “I was washing at night out in the yard—” I immediately felt in my inner spirit, which at that time had almost been abandoned by poetry, proof, like the appearance of a meteor (hard and brilliant), that I hadn’t been wrong to continue to place value in it, and a model that I could scarcely hope to imitate. In these few words I first found the dense precipitation of real things belonging to the outside world: a barrel, a door with its padlock, salt, an axe, cloth (it didn’t matter that they were not necessarily on the same footing). And then other visible, much vaster things, but things so worn down by lyrical exploitation that they were almost unpronounceable: water, night, sky, stars, earth. And these vast things regained vitality and truth simultaneously because they were linked to the first, more modest, domestic, particular things, and because they were consciously felt and enunciated in all their roughness; the black, ice-cold water, the rough stars, the stern earth.
What this poem evokes — a man washing himself outside in the cold of night — can be taken as a kind of event that illuminates a kind of hypothesis (conditions imposed by circumstances or chosen at random, this scene can take on prophetic and tragic tone for those of us who know what was to follow and what shadows already hung over Mandelstam’s life at that time). But it is also one of the moments in life when things — especially the great, worn-out, or forgotten elemental realities — are suddenly given back their immediate presence, their weight, their almost infinite dimensions.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Village of Kolchedan, 1912. Library of Congress.
The first line only states something banal (and the words translated “in the courtyard” [Peter France translates it simply as “yard”] could just as well mean “outside”). But in the second verse there are two details that begin to alter the meaning: the Russian word used for the sky is literally, in fact, “firmament” (a word I believe is unusable here in French), therefore the solid sky, the durable sky; and the stars, those insipid angels of far too many poems, are said to be “rough,” an adjective perhaps related to the German “grob.” Furthermore: their light (or, more precisely, their “beams,” but can we say “beams” or even “glowing” here? Celan simply translates it as “Licht,” as he rightly translates “Himmel”) is “like salt upon an axe” (according to Mandelstam’s frequent association of salt and stars). The poem is only at its third line, but there are already two things under a hard sky, the salt and the axe, which both evoke a certain world, a certain harshness of existence, and yet also mean much more, especially in their encounter: the flavor of harshness, that which gives flavor and can also burn and shine, and that which slices, wounds, and shines, too: two white things, cold like the water in the barrel that appears next. None of this is calculated, sought after, or imparted by the extravagance of dreams: everything is perfectly linked, perfectly simple and sober; everything is charged with meaning while keeping its share of mystery.
Another detail: this courtyard, if it is a courtyard, has a door, or a gate, but it is latched shut with a bolt — things made of wood and iron — the night and the outside are not familiar or secure enough to be left open. And in this enclosed space, like the space of the barrel enclosing the increasingly cold water where we first saw the hard sky, what we are now rediscovering is the ground. We are not in the disorientating fog of a familiar kind of lyricism. The sky is hard, the courtyard enclosed, the earth — “conscience” — severe and unyiedling.
Then, in a new shift to a new image, a thought is expressed, namely that it would be difficult to conceive anywhere of a “standard,” or just as well a support, a ground, (a “Grund”) “purer than the truth of new-made cloth.” The word “cloth” refers to Mandelstam’s passionate interest for “textiles,” a natural metaphor for “text,” which we have all too often had beaten into our heads. But for me, it is first and foremost the rough towel (Mandelstam would later talk of the “rough grain” of rest in reference to Bely’s death) with which the man dries his body after having washed. It seems that this is the axis around which the poem turned. The movement foretold from the beginning, which had been merely that of the water growing colder, now spreads out and takes on meaning; star and salt, commingled, sink into the barrel’s water, which, now icy, grows darker — death appears more pure (less mingled, more whole), distress more bitter, and yet also more flavorful, and finally the earth — the ground on which we walk and stand upright, on which we must stand upright — appears both more truthful and more fearsome.
Edgar Degas, Paysage de Bourgogne, 1890. Musée D’Orsay.
Thus, there is no appeasement, no harmonization of opposites at the end, nor any of those final fortissimos or pianissimos that beguile the ear and the mind. On the contrary, there is a heightened hardness, as if the world had turned to black stone — ground, walls, and roof — but also the most incorruptible of substances. Yes, I felt this poem like a block of night, hard and cold, but at the same time this hardness and coldness are a brutal baptism; this black is as beautiful as a lump of coal, and even misfortune and death have a force of presence, a compactness that I feel here to be beautiful, fully approved of by the heart. And I think back to this passage from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace about the worker’s apprenticeship: “Injuries: this is the trade entering into the body. May all suffering make the universe enter into the body.”
I would be tempted to compare this poem to a short fugue built on the few “subjects” I’ve mentioned with a rigor worthy of Bach, to whom Mandelstam paid tribute in a poem from 1913, calling him “most judicious” and a “Laconic old man,” and whom he particularly admired for having “introduced the Gothic to music,” that is, for Mandelstam, a living architecture commensurate with an upright body. From there, one line of thought would lead to an examination of the importance of the skeleton for Mandelstam, the framework, as well as stones; another to his frequent, instinctive connections between the world of sound and the mountain (and the church), as in the 1919 poem: “What sort of line could deliver / Crystal high notes in the fortified ether.”
But we must be careful: if this word fugue, like counterpoint and polyphony, often imposes itself on us when we want to discern the structure of Mandelstam’s poems (and what he said in his Conversation About Dante, that the poet was the “most powerful chemical conductor of a poetic composition” can only encourage this), it is impermissible, and the same goes for Bach, to reduce them to abstract or arbitrary constructions. Each of the words in the poems, whether used directly or figuratively, and which we might be tempted to compare to the “subjects” of the fugue, to the “themes” or often the “leitmotifs,” is charged like a star with radiant power, charged with an experience profoundly lived or with dreams profoundly dreamt. Each is intensely embodied, like the sculpted elements integrated into the great aerial network of Gothic cathedrals.
This also applies to another, fuller and more complex fugue, the “Slate Pencil Ode” of 1923, one of the most mysterious and admirable poems of this period.
He also weaves together a number of themes dominated by elemental realities; minerals like flint, slate, pebbles, and iron; liquids, like torrential mountain water or milk (always linked in Mandelstam’s work to sheep and goats); and fluids like the bright, limpid air of mountain heights. And what we see being built, stanza after stanza, with an energy and a rigor worthy of Bach, is, indissolubly, the perspective of a language, of a new song, and a landscape that is, in some way, both real and mental, towards which Mandelstam’s avid gaze moves with all its passion: more precisely, an abrupt mountain landscape, with transparent air and stone, of rushing water and tender milk, nocturnal, a wild landscape where the voice, like the pebble, becomes a “a scholar of the flowing stream;” a landscape whose violently desired radiance can be found throughout the work.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, View of Kamenskii Cast Iron Smelting Factory, 1910. Library of Congress.
More than a fugue, the other great poem from 1923, “One Who Finds A Horseshoe,” resembles a grand fantasia, with a broader, more open tone, and which, instead of returning back to itself at the end, unfolds and loses itself in a slow decrescendo.
It begins, as in Homer, with the broad unfolding of a “classical” comparison (between forests and ships); each term refers to the other like the image in the mirror (and here, there would be much to say about Mandelstam’s love for wood and his respect for the “keen reckoning of a joiner’s eye,” which he already praised in 1913 as the true condition of the beautiful), but then the work’s momentum is abruptly broken by a simple question: “Where to begin?” And this brings to the surface of the poem the anxiety of those who must begin to speak again in an air already overloaded with figures, where each word seems to outweigh the other, in a world whose “fragile chronology is nearing an end.” So that all the images, no less admirable and powerful, which are lined up seamlessly at the end (from that of the horseshoe that preserves — calmed — the memory of the race, of the mouth that retains the shape of the last word spoken, of the hand that believes it is still holding a full jug when really half the water had been spilled out along the way, to the coins sown in the earth like seeds, worn down by time) all these images speak of nothing but traces: all that remains, weakened but not yet annihilated, of some living human presence.
And the Armenian cycle of October–November 1930 in Tbilisi, in which a silence of nearly five years is torn apart as if by the joyful glare of a Gabrielian trumpet? It seems to me that this is the diurnal, solar counterpart to the nocturne of 1921 that was too laboriously commented on at the beginning of these remarks: it is the same collision, but this time joyful, against the radiant reality of the outside, against the body of the world. Here, too, the universe enters the body, but through happiness... And all these themes are linked together in a sort of wild hallelujah: the blue of the sky and the ochre of the clay, the words and the pottery, the lion and the bird, the rose and the snow, the horses, the leaping water, the fresh mountain...
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, View of Tiflis [Tbilisi] from Botanic mountain, ca. 1905-1915. Library of Congress.
Reading this cycle and the prose of Journey to Armenia, I can’t help but think of what Rilke wrote in a letter to Ellen Delp on October 27, 1925, about Toledo, where he said, miraculously, “the outward things themselves — tower, mountain, bridge — instantly possessed the unparalleled, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one would have wished to portray them.” Yes, I think that Armenia was for Mandelstam the real figure of the landscape glimpsed in “The Slate Pencil Ode” and scattered elsewhere, so violently desired, hence the jubilation of this encounter and the two works born of it. It was truly the “sabbatical country,” and more than that, the Promised Land glimpsed before returning to the sinister black and yellow of Leningrad and the fateful succession of the years that led to a horrible death. It was above all a sunny land, like the Tauris of ancient poems, capable of tanning the arms of a loved one (and for Mandelstam, as for the ancient Greeks, “In kingdom of the dead there are / No tanned and gorgeous arms”). A land where even the detestable cold and snow brought joy. And above all, once again, a land of arid mountains, of the beginning of the world, of intense, living colors (like those in children’s coloring books or the French paintings he ran to see at the Pushkin Museum on his return to Moscow from Voronezh in 1937), a land of children playing amongst tombs, a land with a tongue that is a clawed language, like a blacksmith’s tool, a land of shepherds and horsemen. The pages of Journey to Armenia where Mandelstam recalls his excursion to Mount Aragats are a key to his work, and it is no coincidence that they link a passion for the mountains with the "whey of silence" around the camps of flocks, and the proud exhilaration of the ride, which became a model of language and a model of life:
Which tense do you want to live in?
— I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle— in the “what ought to be.”
I feel like breathing that way. That’s what I like. There exists such a thing as mounted, bandit-band, equestrian honor. That’s why I like the fine Latin “gerundive” — that verb on horseback.
Yes, the Latin genius, when it was young and greedy, created that form of imperative verbal traction as the prototype of our whole culture, and it was not the only thing that “ought to be” but the thing that “ought to be praised”— laudatura est — the thing we like. . .
All of Mandelstam’s courage, all his intractable love of life, the man who chose Dante’s verse “Cosi gridai colla faccia levata” [So, I cried, with lifted face…] as the epigraph to his Conversation with Dante (though he would later — more humble, more cheerfully — learn a way of cocking his head upright from a goldfinch in Voronezh) are condensed here into a few words.
Looking at the work a little more closely, it seems to me that it’s not only in these beautiful poems of the twenties and thirties, but also in a number of lesser known works (in contrast to what happens in the earlier works, marveling at the delicacy of the touch: foam, lace, frost and mist), that a kind of clash occurs between the poet and the outside, which, however painful, is always a source of plenitude. And this is obviously the world in which shepherds and horsemen live, the patient and the spirited.
Edgar Degas, Oliviers sur fond de montagne, ca. 1890-1892. Norton Simon Museum.
But when the outside attacks with an even greater intensity, like the valley “green to the point of wincing” in the canzone of 1931, or the “snow that bites the eyes” of 1922, I think of Hölderlin, after his return from Bordeaux, who (having had so much difficulty, as a young man, to rejoin reality) sees memories of the south coming back to him: “from town, where the smell of lemons / And oil from Provence rises almost painfully / To the nose.” And it seems in many of Mandelstam’s final poems, those from Voronezh, this clash intensifies an almost suffocating fusion (but the suffocation is under “the black velvet of the Soviet night” and the asthma that physically translated it goes back a long way: this line, from the summer of 1932, reads “Every day it becomes harder for me to breathe.”)
“I sing no longer — now it’s just my breath,” says a poem from February of 1937, to which he adds, with an extraordinary force that confirms this sentiment of fusion, “Ears sheathed in mountains, head deaf…” And in an earlier poem, from the stanzas of May–June of 1935, he also said:
asphyxia is gone, and in my voice
the earth resounds—the weapon of all weapons,
the black earth’s million hectares, dryly moist!
If in Armenia there was still a fresh and marvelous distance between the desired snow and the mouth to be “tamed by a pipe,” in Voronezh in 1937, when Mandelstam brought to his lips the “sticky oath” of leaves and the “oath breaking earth,” it is no longer clear whether it is the hunger to live or the horror of suffocation that prevails.
In these harsh “Fragments of Destroyed Poems” from 1931 we read:
The tongue is a bear — it rolls deafly
in the cave of the mouth . . .
This is the wild, indomitable force (the “golden fleece,” which, after the shell of the Greek tortoise, serves as the poet’s lyre) that inhabits Mandelstam's buildings of wood and stone, the force for which he was killed. But it was a killing in vain, because his words resurface today like torrential water slapping us in the face.
Original publication: Quelques notes à propos de Mandelstam : Revue de Belles-Lettres, Genève, 104e année, nos 1–4, 1981.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, General view of Artvin from the small town of Svet, ca. 1905-1915. Library of Congress.
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most important modernist poets. Before his 1934 arrest for privately circulated poems critical of the Soviet regime, he published two poetry collections, a memoir, a collection of essays and prose works, and numerous works of journalism, travel writing, and translation in the Soviet press. From 1934 to 1937, serving his exile in a southern Russian city, Mandelstam composed the body of work known as The Voronezh Notebooks. Re-arrested a year after his return from exile, Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Poet, translator, novelist, and Zen monk, John High (Ninso) has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities, as well as four Fulbrights. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper (Wet Cement Press). A co-founder of the Long Island University MFA Program, he has taught in Istanbul, Moscow, Hangzhou, and San Francisco, and facilitated workshops in creative transformation in Asia, Europe, and the US. His co-translation (with Matvei Yankelevich) of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He lives in Lisbon.
Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor. His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook) and Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets; with Eugene Ostashevsky), winner of the National Translation Award. His co-translation (with John High) of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He is editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation and proprietor-publisher of the small press Winter Editions. He teaches translation at Columbia University and elsewhere.
Andrew Christopher Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Düsseldorf. His writings can be found in Caesura Magazine and Jugend ohne Film. Recent projects include the realization exhibition Philosopher of Her Own Ruin, curated by Alan Longino at the Bonner Kunstverein, together with Fatima Hellberg and Martha Joseph.
