Poetic Injustice: Osip Mandelstam by Adam Kirsch
Morrissey Breen
Poetic Injustice
Osip Mandelstam claimed Russian as the "pure and clear" medium of
great literature. His misfortune was to be an artist in a political
age.
by ADAM KIRSCH
"My animal, my age," wrote Osip Mandelstam in 1923, "who will ever be
able/to look into your eyes?" In Stalin's Russia, few writers looked
directly into the murderous eyes of the age and lived. Strangely, it
was the poets—seemingly the least threatening of writers—who suffered
the most. Lev Gumilyov was executed by a firing squad in 1921, leaving
his ex-wife, Anna Akhmatova, to face decades of harassment and
censorship; Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941, after years of
persecution; Peretz Markish was executed, along with other Jewish
writers, in 1952.
But it was Mandelstam who became the emblematic martyr of poetry under
Communism. This is partly because he was, by common consent, one of
the greatest Russian poets who ever lived; in the words of his
successor Joseph Brodsky, "what he did will last as long as the
Russian language exists." For readers who can only approach
Mandelstam's poetry through the distorting scrim of translation,
however, his legend is based largely on his wife Nadezhda's great
memoir, Hope Against Hope, first published in 1970. As Brodsky said,
"one would instantly understand—even without knowing a single line by
Mandelstam—that it is indeed a great poet being recalled in these
pages, because of the quantity and energy of the evil directed against
him." This evil took the form of slander, censorship, arrest, exile,
and finally imprisonment in the Gulag, where Mandelstam
died—officially, of a heart attack—in 1938.
It was Mandelstam's misfortune to be a pure artist in a generation
doomed to politics: "The wolfhound age springs at my shoulders/Though
I'm no wolf by blood." He was born in 1891, to a Jewish family in
Warsaw. Unlike the vast majority of Jews in the Russian Empire, the
Mandelstams were able, thanks to business connections, to escape the
Pale of Settlement, moving to St. Petersburg while their son was still
very young. (The exact date, like much about Mandelstam's early life,
remains unknown.) It was as a Petersburger, then, that Mandelstam was
raised, and the city became one of the central subjects of his work.
In a poem written in 1930, he would assert his claim to the city the
Soviets renamed Leningrad:
I've come back to my city. These are my own old tears,
my own little veins, the swollen glands of my childhood...
Petersburg! I've still got the addresses:
I can look up dead voices.
Mandelstam's anomalous position as a Jew in the Russian capital helped
to fuel his intense need to claim and be claimed. His poetry,
saturated in Russian history and classical myth, almost never treats
Jewish subjects; Judaism is the only major part of the European
cultural inheritance that Mandelstam holds at arm's length. His deep
discomfort with Jewishness began in childhood, as he records in his
impressionistic memoir The Noise of Time. From the beginning, the
future poet saw the choice between Russian and Jewish identities as a
choice between languages:
"In my childhood I absolutely never heard Yiddish....The speech of my
mother was clear and sonorous without the least foreign admixture,
with rather wide and too open vowels—the literary Great Russian
language. Her vocabulary was poor and restricted, the locutions were
trite, but it was a language, it had roots and confidence. Mother
loved to speak and took joy in the roots and sounds of her Great
Russian speech, impoverished by intellectual clichés. Was she not the
first of her whole family to achieve pure and clear Russian sounds? My
father had absolutely no language; his speech was tongue-tie and
languagelessness. The Russian speech of a Polish Jew? No. The speech
of a German Jew? No again.... it was anything in the world, but not a
language, neither Russian nor German."
Whenever Jewishness appears in The Noise of Time, it takes the form of
an ugly and alien language. When his family makes a rare visit to the
synagogue, the young Mandelstam notes "how offensive was the crude
speech of the rabbi...how utterly vulgar all that he said!" When he
travels to visit his grandparents in Riga, his grandfather tries to
teach him to pray in Hebrew, with miserable results: "my grandfather
drew from a drawer of a chest a black-and-yellow silk cloth, put it
around my shoulders, and made me repeat after him words composed of
unknown sounds; but, dissatisfied with my babble, he grew angry and
shook his head in disapproval. I felt stifled and afraid." When his
parents hire a "real Jewish teacher" for him, Mandelstam's first
impression is that "his correct Russian sounded false."
All of these incidents help to explain why Mandelstam titled one
chapter of his memoir "The Judaic Chaos." Judaism, for him, meant an
archaic, incomprehensible, embarrassing language; Russian was the
"pure and clear" medium of great literature. The ferocity with which
he cleaved to Russian and Russianness verges at times on downright
self-hatred. Reading the stories in his Hebrew primer, he remembers,
"I saw nothing of myself...and with all my being revolted against the
book and the subject." In part, such a reaction can be ascribed to
Mandelstam's predicament as a Jew in gentile Petersburg. But just as
important was his conviction that a poet's connection with his
language must be exclusive and primeval:
Sweeter to me
than the singing speech of Italy
is the language to which I was born.
Notes of remote harps well up in it
in secret.
The problem of language, which did so much to shape Mandelstam's
identity, is still central to how we approach his work. Russian
poetry, unlike Russian prose, has very rarely been translated
successfully into English. "It has always been difficult for
Westerners...to believe in the greatness of Pushkin," noted Edmund
Wilson; W.H. Auden complained, "I don't see why Mandelstam is
considered a great poet. The translations that I've seen don't
convince me at all."
Now readers have another chance to be convinced by one of the first
English translations of Mandelstam, just brought back into print by
New York Review Books. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated
by the eminent poet W.S. Merwin and the Mandelstam specialist Clarence
Brown, first came out in 1974. Brown, a Russian scholar at Princeton,
was instrumental in bringing Mandelstam to the English-speaking world,
writing the first biography of the poet and translating his essays and
memoirs. This volume had its origins in the translations Brown roughed
out for use in his biography; he and Merwin worked together to turn
them into viable English poems.
But are they faithful reflections of what Mandelstam wrote? Joseph
Brodsky, a formidable authority, insisted that they were not. In his
essay on Mandelstam, "The Child of Civilization" (it can be found in
his essay collection Less Than One), Brodsky took aim at translators
who turn Mandelstam's rigorously formal poems into free verse. "Calls
for the use of 'an instrument of poetry in our own time,'" Brodsky
insisted, mean stripping Mandelstam of his extremely dense verbal
music; the result is "a sort of common denominator of modern verbal
art." "The cavalier treatment" of meter and rhyme, Brodsky wrote
hyperbolically, "is at best a sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a
murder."
The Merwin-Brown translation is one of the sacrileges he had in mind.
The phrase he quotes so derisively comes from Brown's introduction:
"We have tried to translate Mandelstam into the English that works as
an instrument of poetry in our own time." In this they are successful,
at least in the sense that their versions are idiomatic. Certainly
they avoid the kind of awkward, stilted rhymes that Brodsky himself
produced when he tried to translate his own work into English. Whether
the result is close to Mandelstam, only a reader fluent in both
Russian and English—that is, a reader who doesn't need a translation
in the first place—can say for sure. All Brown ventures to guarantee
is that "we have not consciously invented thoughts or images that the
original could in no sense warrant."
The problem of translation is made still more complicated, in
Mandelstam's case, by the fact that he is an exceptionally difficult
poet, even in Russian. (Several translators have since tried their
hand at bringing him into English, including Bernard Meares, James
Green, and Richard and Elizabeth McKane; read a discussion of their
comparative merits.) Mandelstam belonged to the generation of T.S.
Eliot, and took part in a Russian literary movement, Acmeism, that was
roughly analogous to Anglo-American Modernism. His work has the
density, free association, and accelerated movement typical of high
modernist poetry; as Brown writes, Mandelstam shares "the intuitive
and purely verbal logic...of Mallarmé."
To read these Selected Poems, then, is not to understand Mandelstam
fully—even in the way that certain parts of Eliot can be understood
poetically even as they remain opaque. Instead, Merwin and Brown offer
glimpses of magnificence. Here is the early Mandelstam of Stone
(1913), praising the strict classicism of Petersburg's Admiralty
building:
An aerial ship and a touch-me-not mast,
a yardstick for Peter's successors, teaching
that beauty is no demi-god's whim,
it's the plain carpenter's fierce rule-of-eye.
Here, as often, Merwin makes Mandelstam sound rather like Robert
Lowell, another poet obsessed by history. In the poems of Tristia
(1922), his second book, Mandelstam evokes distant times and places
with remarkable suggestiveness:
O Venice, the weight of your garments
and of your mirrors in their cypress frames!
Your air is cut in facets, and mountains
of blue decayed glass melt in the bedchamber.
Perhaps the most powerful phase of Mandelstam's writing came in the
first half of the 1920s, when he composed his great odes: "He Who
Finds a Horseshoe," "The Slate Ode," "1 January 1924." These poems
have something of Hölderlin's cosmic vision, and something of Yeats's
hieratic grandeur:
Now I study the scratched diary
of the slate's summer,
the language of flint and air,
a layer of darkness, a layer of light.
I want to thrust my hand
into the flint path from an old song
as into a wound, and hold together
the flint and the water, the horseshoe and the ring.
In the late 1920s Mandelstam fell silent, increasingly oppressed by
the regimentation of Soviet literature. When he started to write
again, in 1930, he was more shockingly explicit than ever in his
resistance to the "wolfhound age." It was a poem about Stalin that led
to his first arrest in 1934:
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can't hear our words.
But wherever there's a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
After his imprisonment, Mandelstam was physically and mentally
shattered; he even tried to commit suicide by jumping out a window. In
the three years he and Nadezhda spent in exile in Voronezh, Osip
Mandelstam produced the work known as the "Voronezh Notebooks," which
his widow managed to preserve through decades of persecution. In these
last poems, most of them brief and fragmentary, Mandelstam writes as
one already condemned to die, but still determined to bear witness:
Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.
I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books
much loved, and in children's games I shall rise
from the dead to say the sun is shining.
The Merwin-Brown Selected Poems gives us only a partial view of
Mandelstam. For one thing, some of his most famous poems, such as
"Hagia Sophia" and "Notre Dame," are not included. More crucial, as
Brodsky pointed out, is the question of form: Russian formal verse is
a medium essentially different from American free verse. There is no
way to guess at all the associations and implications, the echoes and
nuances, that a Russian reader finds in Mandelstam. Perhaps all an
English reader can do is try to conjecture an original from the wide
range of copies produced by different translators. For this purpose,
the Merwin-Brown version remains important and valuable.
Adam Kirsch is the book critic of the New York Sun.
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