{"id":14030,"date":"2016-01-15T16:25:15","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T20:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=14030"},"modified":"2016-01-15T16:25:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T20:25:15","slug":"thoughts-on-osip-mandelstams-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/thoughts-on-osip-mandelstams-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Osip Mandelstam’s Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"osip-mandelstam5\"<\/a>A\u00a0birthday that\u00a0happened\u00a0125 years ago today\u2026 & still I can\u2019t find an English translation that satisfies me completely. Most of them feel more or less flat, with Mandelstam turned into a most salon-f\u00e4hig lyrical poet of medium to low intensity. (Oddly enough this is true especially of those translations extolled by Joseph Brodsky, someone who should have know, as he was a native Russian who wound up writing in English, but I guess my judgment here may be tainted as I\u00a0find Brodsky\u2019s English work tr\u00e8s fade<\/em>\u2026) Clarence Brown\u2019s versions may\u00a0still be the least problematic, but I can\u2019t wait for John High\u2019s complete Mandelstam (his collaborative versions with Matvei Yankelevich are lovely indeed) \u2014 John, we need these! I have not yet been able to get Andrew Davis\u2019 just published versions\u00a0of the Voronezh Notebooks<\/em>, out earlier this month from NYRB Poets. Way back when \u2014 late sixties \u2014 my Bard College co-student Bruce McClelland published a translation of Tristia<\/em>, which I found\u00a0useful and quite\u00a0readable back then. I\u00a0wish he had continued to work on Mandelstam, but unhappily his interests wandered elsewhere.<\/p>\n

What I have come to realize over the years is that the\u00a0translation of truly major\u00a0poets (of which Mandelstam\u00a0is one) cannot be approached\u00a0as an occasional occupation, i.e. as either a quick way to learn the tricks of a master (translating is the closest reading you can give a poem, so indeed the<\/em> most\u00a0useful activity in\u00a0learning to write, as I have been telling my students for many years) or as a way to locate possibilities of publication by associating one\u2019s (as yet unknown) name with that of a well-known poet (though that too can be useful for a serious young poet).\u00a0Looking at such multiple scatter-shot translations, in magazines, chapbooks or single volumes of major poets by numerous translators, gives me at times the impression of a haphazard gaggle of young (or not so young) poet-translators cutting their teeth by\u00a0feeding on the\u00a0giant corpse of a dead beached whale. \u00a0At the same time, I\u2019d like to add, having several translations of a great poem can\u00a0also be of good comparative use.<\/p>\n

Just as one does not\u00a0become a poet by absolving\u00a0a 2-year MFA\u00a0(even if the institution would seem to suggest this by giving the MFA graduate the legal right to teach his or her craft once the diploma has been framed),\u00a0it would be better to approach such a major foreign\u00a0poet not only\u00a0with the humbleness of the beginner\u00a0but also\u00a0with the desire for an open-ended apprenticeship that may even turn out to be be life-long. Exemplary for me, in that sense, is Clayton Eshleman\u2019s decades-long translation work on C\u00e9sar Vallejo \u2014 a work Eshleman has linked\u00a0to Charles Olson\u2019s proposal in \u201cA Bibliography\u00a0on America for Ed Dorn\u201d for\u00a0a \u201csaturation job\u201d that would get the young poet \u201cin\u201d once and for all. (A saturation\u00a0job, Olson explains, consists in\u00a0learning everything that can be learned & known about something\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a man, an event, a thing, so that you know more than anyone else about this.)<\/p>\n

Another man who has spent his life working\u00a0in such a way is the Swiss poet, translator, essayist Ralph Dutli, who besides his own work (which also includes an excellent novel on the painter Chaim Soutine\u2019s last days)\u00a0has edited, translated & published\u00a0\u00a0a 10-volume edition of Mandelstam\u2019s works (the poems in both languages) as well as writing four volumes of essays on OM, plus the best biography of Mandelstam we have. A major oeuvre of which the essays and the biography should be translated into English!<\/p>\n

Now, despite the fact that I do admire and use Dutli\u2019s German translations, I tend to read Mandelstam\u2019s poetry in Paul Celan\u2019s German versions \u2014 for me, who doesn\u2019t have Russian, the best and richest versions. Celan also wrote a radioplay on Mandelstam for two voices \u2014\u00a0a version of which with Charles Bernstein & me\u00a0\u201cdoing the voices\u201d was recorded late last year & should be available this spring as a podcast (the text\u00a0can be found in\u00a0The Meridian<\/a>, published a few years back by Stanford University Press). It contains several poems by Mandelstam in Celan\u2019s translations \u2014 & which I thus had to translate from Celan\u2019s German into English. Let me close this meditation on translation on Mandelstam\u2019s birthday with the last of those poems framed by Celan\u2019s speakers:<\/p>\n

\n

Speaker 1: In 1928 a further volume of poems appears \u2013 the last one. A new\u00a0collection joins the two previous ones also gathered in it. \u201cNo more breath \u2013 the firmament swarms with maggots!\u201d: this line opens the cycle. The question about\u00a0the where-from becomes more urgent, more desperate \u2013 the poetry \u2013 in one of his\u00a0essays he calls it a plough \u2013 tears open the abyssal strata of time, the \u201cblack earth\u00a0of time\u201d appears on the surface. The eye, talking with the perceived, and pained,\u00a0develops a new ability: it becomes visionary: it accompanies the poem into its\u00a0underground. The poem writes itself toward an other, a \u201cstrangest\u201d time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0JANUARY1924<\/p>\n

Whoever kisses time\u2019s sore brow
\nwill often, like a son, think tenderly
\nhow she, time, laid down to sleep outside
\nin high heaped wheat drifts, in the corn.<\/p>\n

Whoever has raised the century\u2019s eyelid
\n\u2013 both slumber-apples, large and heavy \u2013 ,
\nhears noise, hears the streams roar
\nthe lying times, relentlessly<\/p>\n

Imperious century, with loam-beautiful mouth
\nand two apples, asleep \u2013 yet
\nbefore it dies: to the son\u2019s hand, so shrunken,
\nit bends down its lip.<\/p>\n

Life\u2019s breath, I know, ebbs away each day,
\none more small one, a small one \u2013 and
\ndeceased is the song of mortification, loam and plague,
\nwith lead they seal your mouth.<\/p>\n

Oh loam-and-life! Oh century\u2019s death!
\nOnly to the one, I\u2019m afraid, does its meaning reveal itself,
\nin whom there was a smile, helpless \u2013 to the inheritor,
\nthe man who lost himself.<\/p>\n

Oh pain, oh to search for the lost word.
\noh lid and lid to raise, sick and weak,
\nfor generations, the strangest, with lime in your blood
\nto gather the grass and the weed of night!<\/p>\n

Time. The lime in the blood of the sick son
\nturns hard. Moscow, that wooden coffer, sleeps.
\nTime, the sovereign. And no escape anywhere\u2026
\nThe snow\u2019s apple-scent, as always.<\/p>\n

The sill here: I wish I could leave it.
\nWhereto? The street \u2013 darkness.
\nAnd, as if it were salt, so white, there on the pavement
\nlies my conscience, spread out before me.<\/p>\n

Through winding lanes, through slipways
\nthe journey goes, somehow:
\na bad passenger sits in a sled
\npulls a blanket over the knees.<\/p>\n

The lanes, the shimmering lanes, the by-lanes
\nthe runners crunch\u2019s like apples under the tooth.
\nThe strap, I can\u2019t grab it,
\nit doesn\u2019t want me to, and the hand is clammy.<\/p>\n

Night, cartwoman, with what scrap and iron
\nare you rolling through Moscow?
\nFish thud here, and there, from pink houses,
\nit steams toward you \u2013 scalegold!<\/p>\n

Moscow, anew. Ah, I greet you, once more!
\nForgive, excuse \u2013 my misery wasn\u2019t very great.
\nI like to call them, as always, my brethren:
\nthe pike\u2019s saying and the hard frost!<\/p>\n

The snow in the pharmacy\u2019s raspberry light\u2026
\nA clattering, from afar, an Underwood\u2026
\nThe coachman\u2019s back\u2026 the roadway, blown away\u2026
\nWhat more do you want? They won\u2019t kill you.<\/p>\n

Winter \u2013 beauty. And skyward the white,
\nthe starmilk \u2013 it streams, streams away and blinks.
\nThe horsehair blanket crunches along the icy
\nrunners \u2013 the horsehair blanket sings!<\/p>\n

The little lanes, smoking, the petroleum, always \u2013 :
\nswallowed by snow, raspberry colored.
\nThey hear the Soviet-sonatina jingle,
\nremember the year twenty.<\/p>\n

Does it make me swear and damn?
\n\u2013 The frost\u2019s apple-scent, again \u2013
\nOh oath that I swore to the fourth estate!
\nOh my promise, heavy with tears!<\/p>\n

Oh whom will you kill? Whom will you praise?
\nAnd what lie, tell me, are you going to make up?
\nTear off this cartilage, the keys of the machine:
\nthe pike\u2019s bones you lay open.<\/p>\n

The lime in the blood of the sick son: it fades.
\nA laughter, blissful, frees itself \u2013
\nSonatas, powerful\u2026 The little sonatina
\nof the typewriter \u2013 : only its shadow!<\/p>\n

2. Speaker: That\u2019s how to escape contingency: through laughter. Through what\u00a0we know as the poet\u2019s \u201csenseless\u201d laughter \u2013 through the absurd. And on the way\u00a0there what does appear \u2013mankind is absent \u2013 has answered: the horsehair blanket\u00a0has sung.\u00a0Poems are sketches for Being: the poet lives according to them.\u00a0In the thirties Osip Mandelstam is caught in the \u201cpurges.\u201d The road leads to Siberia,\u00a0where we lose his trace.\u00a0In \u201cJourney to Armenia,\u201d one of his last proses published in 1932 in the Leningrad\u00a0magazine \u201cSwesda,\u201d we also find notes on the matters of poetry. In one of these\u00a0notes Mandelstam remembers his preference for the Latin Gerund.<\/p>\n

The Gerund ! <\/span>that is the present participle of the passive form of the future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0birthday that\u00a0happened\u00a0125 years ago today\u2026 & still I can\u2019t find an English translation that satisfies me completely. Most of them feel more or less flat, with Mandelstam turned into a most salon-f\u00e4hig lyrical poet...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,103],"tags":[583,1730],"class_list":["post-14030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-osip-mandelstam","tag-paul-celan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14030"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14036,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14030\/revisions\/14036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}