Another Mandelstam Poem via Celan

Andrew Shields says:

I hope you don’t mind if I share my version of the same with you:

THE FIRST OF JANUARY 1924

Whoever kissed it — the raw and painful brow
of time — a son, he’ll often think, with warmth,
still, how time lay down to sleep outside
in the high piles of wheat, in the corn.

The century’s eyelids — anyone who ever raised
them up, two pupils drowsing, heavy and large,
he hears the din, he hears the torrents rage,
incessantly, torrents of mendacious ages.

The century, imperious, its mouth
lovely with loam, its sleeping pupils — but
before it dies: it will still bend down
to kiss the shrunken hand of the son.

The breath of life, I know, subsides with every day;
a little more, a little — and dead
is the song of insult, loam, and plague,
they seal this mouth for you with lead.

O loam-and-life! O century’s demise!
To him alone it will confide, I fear,
your sense, in whom there was a helpless smile —
the man who lost himself, the heir.

O pain, o to seek the word that’s lost,
o to raise, sick and weak, lid and lid,
to pick the herb of night, to pick the grass,
for the farthest races, with lime in your blood!

Time. The lime hardens in the blood
of the ailing son. Asleep, the wooden casket, Moscow.
Time, the ruler. And nowhere any way out …
Just as before, the apple scent of snow.

This threshold that I wish I could desert.
But to go where? The street — obscurity.
And my conscience lies, as white as salt,
scattered on the pavement in front of me.

Through winding alleys, narrow passages,
is where it’s somehow going, the journey:
sitting in a sled, a lousy passenger
pulling the blanket over his knee.

The alleys, gleaming alleys, more and more;
like apples between teeth, the runner’s crunch.
I cannot get a grip on that loop there;
it’s escaping me, and my hand is numb.

Night, you toiler, rolling through Moscow,
what kind of junk and iron do you haul?
There, leaping fish, and there, from glowing houses,
steaming up from the scales — such gold!

Moscow, anew. I greet you once again!
Forgive, excuse — it was not great, my loss.
O brothers whom I’m always glad to name:
the watchword of the pike, the bitter frost!

Snow in the pharmacy’s raspberry light …
A far-off clattering, an Underwood …
The coachman’s back … The streets the snowdrifts hide …
Do you want more? They will not murder you.

The winter — lovely. Toward the sky the white,
the milk of stars — it flows; it flows away and blinks.
The horsehair blanket snaps against the iced
runners — the horsehair blanket sings!

The little alleys, smoke of kerosene, so thick,
always — the snow that chokes, once raspberry,
They hear the Soviet sonatina clink,
recall the year of nineteen-twenty.

Does all this drive me to words of abuse and hate?
— The apple scent of frost, once more —
O oath I swore to the fourth estate!
O my vow, heavy with my tears!

Whom will you still murder? Whom will you still praise?
And tell me, what will still occur to you, what lie?
Tear that gristle, the keys of the machine, away:
you expose the bones of the pike.

The lime in the blood of the ailing son: it’s gone.
A blissful laugh is breaking free —
Powerful sonatas … the sonatina, small,
of the typewriter — their shadow only!