The
Berries to Stalin
Osip Mandelstam: New Translations
Ilya Bernstein, ed.
Ugly Duckling Presse
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It cannot have occurred to anyone that
Stalin thought executions “were the berries”. One poem is
translated twice, another thrice, a third five times by five different hands.
This points up Bernstein’s “must
necessarily become elusive” and his “triangulated grasp of the
complex outlines”. The early poems go well and are admirable.
With 1931, the first doubling. Mandelstam contemplates Siberia, and between Fridman and Halberstadt a good
idea of his plight is obtained. Probstein gives
“Impressionism” cleanly, Gritsman’s “Old Crimea” lacks a note or
two. Some of the “Octaves” later. “I live among high-minded
vegetable gardens” is like a scene from David Lean’s Doctor
Zhivago. Now the trio of wintry desolation again unfolds the meaning of
Mandelstam’s eight lines. The quintuplet of translations on the bare
plain in winter and the poet’s heroism bespeaks a certain form of
discretion, as in another way (after the following spring poem) Bernstein’s
treatment of the last poem, gliding over the oxymorons of satire and the
deeper contradiction of the second, final stanza. So much for an overview. “Hagia
Sophia” is imperishable, “Notre Dame” a model of
composition, Homer the very thing. From these acmes, then, to
“Moscow’s five-domed cathedrals, bathed in their / Italian and
Russian spirit, seem / Like bright Aurora rising in the air, / But in fur
coat and with a Russian name.” Greece before Christ, “The
Tortoise” of the lyre, “Where no one breaks the loaf in two and
bites, / Where there are only milk, honey and wine”, evoked with
Villon’s snow. He concludes the decade in 1920 by resolving on an art
“to ease the burden of time.” Straightaway he exercises it on
Venice, “Venetsya... Venetyanka... Susannah must await the
elders.” “Leningrad”, a famous poem, is
like Nabokov’s nightmare of return. He is in exile, the wolves are
about but there is a fine interlude of summer. “Octaves” represents perhaps a
change of startled expression, “All we are is
Hagia Sophia / With an infinite many of eyes.” He needs them, to bear
witness, yet “see how I go blind, become strengthened / bowing to the
smallest of roots? / Are my eyes not blown apart / by the exploding
trees?” There is “an uneven sweetness in her
steps / She walks—running a bit ahead // ...carried forward by a
constrained freedom / Owed to an animating shortcoming / And it may well be
that a lucid guess” etc., answered in the second stanza by the women at
the tomb, the permanence of sky and earth and promise. |