Osip Mandelstam Read online

  Nor does he care much for Balmont’s assumption of superiority to his audience, the fashionably lofty hauteur toward the reader. If the poet has a special relationship to the word-psyche, it is not one that gives him a place on any elevation above the rest of mankind. On the contrary, what distinguishes him from a “literary man” is that he speaks to other men on their own level. The professor, the critic, the litterateur require their elevation; the poet is the same as any other man, if perhaps “not so well made as most.”31 He has no need to be morally superior. Villon, for instance, was a criminal, a murderer, possibly morally inferior to even the average man of his time, and yet a great poet.

  A man speaking to men, with no need to be morally or intellectually superior: yet the poet speaks, and that means he speaks to someone, an addressee, an interlocutor. With its quiet humor and exceptional charm, the essay called “About an Interlocutor” articulates the poet’s reaching out past his beleaguered feeling of impending doom, to a very personal reader of some other time, a time beyond that “wing of oncoming night” he felt already encroaching upon him. The essay conveys, among other things, a remarkable understanding of those commonly not too well understood poems of Pushkin’s about the poet, his publisher, his audience, the powers-that-be. The poet’s interlocutor must be someone not too close, not too immediate. He must elicit surprises and carry about him and also invite a certain mystery. But above all he must be someone. He must have particularity. And that particularity must be respected.

  The Classic has nothing to do with lofty attitudinizing, but rather with the idea of a human potential fulfilled. In this sense Mandelstam speaks in his poems of the Classic lands of the Mediterranean, of Italy and Greece, “those all-human hills” near Florence, and in the same sense, of the lands of the Caucasus and the Crimea which he associates with the Mediterranean, which for him are part of that “all-human” Mediterranean world.32

  In a recent impassioned essay, the novelist Arthur A. Cohen has written well of Mandelstam. Like Nadezhda Iakovlevna, who has insisted on it, he has been able to see how the poems of Mandelstam’s last years, the “phases” and “cycles,” gain from being published complete, all their variants included. He has grasped the mutual implicativeness that joins poem to poem and makes each repetition of a word, a phrase, an image, or an association an addition to the meaning of the cycle. He has gone beyond this to suggest that the poems form a kind of eschatological epic, or that something like an eschatological epic is struggling to be born in them.33 I think one finds implications of this in the last great essays as well: in “Fourth Prose,” “Conversation about Dante,” and Journey to Armenia. Mandelstam’s obsessive themes draw together in them. They capture his sense of a civilization coming to an end, and, in the shipwreck of that civilization, they constitute his letter-in-the-bottle thrown overboard to find a distant interlocutor in future time.

  While the Russian countryside was still being devastated by collectivization and the five-year plans for the forced, rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union were being launched, Mandelstam, who dearly loved travel, went off on what was to be his last extended voluntary journey. He had suffered a writing block for almost five years. The organization and regimentation of the country that preceded and accompanied collectivization and industrialization, including the ever-increasing pressure on writers, editors, and publishers, oppressed his sensibility. Rescuing him from on high at this crucial time, his “protector,” Nikolai Bukharin, arranged for him and his wife to go to Armenia. Whether in the long run his association with Bukharin may have precipitated his last arrest and his death is a moot point, but, just then, it saved his creative life as a poet. The journey itself, his meeting with Andrei Biely, the therapeutic outburst of “Fourth Prose” set the juices flowing again and the lips moving. The essays are certainly overshadowed by the poems, but they partake of the same qualities and, indeed, the same themes as the poems.

  If there is anything that Journey to Armenia is not about, it is not about either the joys of collectivization or the successes of industrialization in Armenia. Whatever expectations may have been aroused by the title—it was a time when writers were going on all kinds of trips and turning them into euphoric odes to the new order—Mandelstam clearly does not aim the essay for entry into the fat privileges of the new writers’ elite. Collectivization and industrialization come up briefly in passing, and an occasional journalistic cliché is inserted for the irony with which it flavors the context. One has the impression that Armenia would probably survive the mechanical regulation imposed by the five-year plans.

  He does not write only about Armenia, but about everything he carries with him to Armenia as well: his memories of Russia, his interest in Impressionist painting (now revived and revised), his obsession with biological theory, especially that of Lamarck, threaded through long dialogues with the chess-playing biologist, his friend, B. S. Kuzin; and, above all, his passion for language, his philology. As elsewhere, he tells his story by means of significant association rather than linear narrative. A chapter on the island of Sevan and its architectural “digs” is followed by a chapter on Zamoskvorech’e, the old merchants’ section of Moscow, setting for so many of the plays of Ostrovsky, dramas of personal and cultural tyranny, and for the poems and essays of Apollon Grigoriev with their exaltation of the “seven-stringed guitar” and the home-soil aspects of Russian nationalism. The fullness of Armenia is contrasted in restrospect with the “watermelon-emptiness of Russia,” with Zamoskvorech’e, where Mandelstam himself had lived, and its “cheery little houses” and “nasty little souls and timidly oriented windows.” Armenia might survive the five-year plans with their hypostasization of nineteenth-century scientific rationalist “Buddhism”—but Zamoskvorech’e?

  In connection with thoughts on evolutionary theory, Mandelstam uses the word “development” (razvitie), which, of course, also has many associations with the five-year plan. It is a word he dislikes: “A plant is a sound evoked by the wand of a termenvox, pulsating in a sphere oversaturated with wave processes. It is the envoy of a living storm that rages permanently in the universe—akin in equal measure to stone and lightning! A plant in the world—that is an event, a happening, an arrow; and not boring, bearded ‘development’!”34 The passage recalls Mandelstam’s poem, no. 254, on Lamarck, and carries as well the implicit comparison of “a plant” with “a poem,” an ineluctable resemblance to Mandelstam’s theory of composition as expressed in “Conversation about Dante” and elsewhere. Even the adjective “bearded” as applied to “development” recalls the Italian idiom Che barba! and the expressive gesture that normally accompanies it. Mandelstam’s biological is really poetic theory:

  All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, something labial or palatal, a sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying one’s expectation.35

  That a Jew should identify closely with Armenia and Armenians is of course not at all unusual or surprising, but an instance of the natural kinship of gifted diasporic peoples, often persecuted, often mistaken one for the other by “the heathen.” What country, as Nadezhda Mandelstam asked, could be more worthy of being called “the younger sister of Judea”?36 Since the mood is eschatological, there is Mount Ararat, where the ark came to rest; and there are the Gog and Magog of the long dark night of imperial oriental siege and conquest. But Armenia resembles Greece and Italy as much as Judea: it is a wine-growing region, with the culture habits that accompany the grape, and there are even traces of an ancient goat cult in the mountains. Above all, Mandelstam is fascinated by the jangling of the philological keys, with his discovery that the Japhetic verbs “to se
e,” “to hear,” and “to understand” once coalesced into a single semantic bundle.37

  Armenia is the first Christian kingdom and the longest Christian survivor as a cultural entity. It is the homeland of Christian architecture—both the Romanesque and the Gothic. Mandelstam sees it as a place of renewal, whose language will be studied when the phonetic ores of Europe and America are all used up, a place lifted outside of time like the Eucharist. Armenians were a people

  whom you respect, with whom you sympathize, of whom you are, though a stranger, proud. The Armenians’ fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things—all this said to me: you’re awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly.

  Wasn’t this because I found myself among people, renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of the zodiac or of a rose inscribed in stone?38

  Mandelstam’s farewell journey—the longer ones he was to make were not of his own choosing—reinvigorated him and renewed his gift. “Parting,” he wrote, “is the younger sister of death,” and his departure from Armenia, “the younger sister of Judea,” was a preparation for death.39 The apocalyptic theme is unmistakable. Yet Mandelstam’s apocalypse is also an apokothastasis: he looks forward not only to the end, but also to resurrection and renewal. Amidst the crumbling of walls and exhaustion of phonetic ores, he counts on “the complicity of those united in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing.”40

  A world come to an end; the world goes on.

  Note

  Note: A previous version of this introductory essay appeared in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 17: 357–373 and was reprinted, with a few changes, in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).

  * Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1973 State University of New York.

  Conversation about Dante

  Translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes

  Così gridai colla faccia levata.

  (Inferno, XVI, 76)

  I.

  Poetic speech is a crossbred process, and it consists of two sonorities. The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second sonority is the speech proper, that is, the intonational and phonetic work performed by the said instruments.

  Understood thus, poetry is not a part of nature, not even the best or choicest part. Still less is it a reflection of nature, which would lead to a mockery of the law of identity; but it is something that, with astonishing independence, settles down in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating nature as acting it out by means of its instruments, which are commonly called images.

  It is only very conditionally possible to speak of poetic speech or thought as sonorous, for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, and of these one, taken by itself, is absolutely mute, while the other, taken apart from its instrumental metamorphosis, is devoid of all significance and all interest and is subject to paraphrase, which is in my opinion the truest sign of the absence of poetry. For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.

  Dante is a master of the instruments of poetry and not a manufacturer of images. He is a strategist of transformations and cross-breedings, and least of all is he a poet in the “All-European” and outwardly cultural sense of this word.

  The wrestlers winding themselves into a tangle in the arena may be regarded as an example of a transformation of instruments and a harmony.

  These naked and glistening wrestlers who walk about pluming themselves on their physical prowess before grappling in the decisive fight. . . .1

  The modern cinema, meanwhile, with its metamorphosis of the tapeworm, turns into a malicious parody on the function of instruments in poetic speech, since its frames move without any conflict and merely succeed one another.

  Imagine something understood, grasped, torn out of obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately upon the completion of the act of understanding and execution.

  In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. Semantic satisfaction is equivalent to the feeling of having carried out a command.

  The wave signals of meaning disappear once they have done their work: the more powerful they are, the more yielding, and the less prone to linger.

  Otherwise one cannot escape the rote drilling, the hammering in of those prepared nails called “cultural-poetic” images.

  External, explanatory imagery is incompatible with the presence of instruments.

  The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.2

  Poetic speech is a carpet fabric with a multitude of textile warps which differ one from the other only in the coloring of the performance, only in the musical score of the constantly changing directives of the instrumental code of signals.

  It is a most durable carpet, woven out of water: a carpet in which the currents of the Ganges (taken as a textile theme) do not mix with the samples of the Nile and the Euphrates, but remain many-hued, in braids, figures, and ornaments—but not in regular patterns, for a pattern is that very paraphrase of which we were speaking. Ornament is good by virtue of the fact that it preserves the traces of its origin as a performed piece of nature—animal, vegetable, steppe, Scythian, Egyptian, what you will, national or barbarian, it is always speaking, seeing, active.

  Ornament is stanzaic.

  Pattern is a matter of lines.

  The poetic hunger of the old Italians is magnificent, their animal, youthful appetite for harmony, their sensual lust after rhyme—il disio.

  The mouth works, the smile moves the verse line, the lips are cleverly and merrily crimson, the tongue presses itself trustfully to the roof of the mouth.

  The inner image of the verse is inseparable from the numberless changes of expression which flit across the face of the teller of tales as he talks excitedly.

  For that is exactly what the act of speech does: it distorts our face, explodes its calm, destroys its mask.

  When I began to study Italian and had only just become slightly acquainted with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of the speech movements had been shifted closer to the lips, to the external mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly acquired a place of honor. The sound rushed toward the canal lock of the teeth. Another observation that struck me was the infantile quality of Italian phonetics, its beautiful childlike quality, its closeness to infant babbling, a sort of immemorial Dadaism:3

  e, consolando, usava l’idioma

  che prima i padri e le madri trastulla:

  . . . . . . .

  favoleggiava con la sua famiglia

  de’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.4

  (Paradiso, XV, 122–123, 125–126)

  Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to enter into concordanza.

  There is a marvelous abundance of endings that are wed to each other. The Italian verb gains force as it approaches its end and
only in the ending does it live. Every word hastens to burst forth, to fly from the lips, go away, and clear a place for the others.

  When it became necessary to trace the circumference of a time for which a millennium was less than the wink of an eyelash, Dante introduced an infantile “transsense”5 language into his astronomical, concertante, deeply public, pulpit lexicon.

  The creation of Dante is above all the emergence into the world arena of the Italian language of his day, its emergence as a whole, as a system.

  The most Dadaist of all the Romance languages moved into first place internationally.

  II.

  It is essential to demonstrate some bits and pieces of Dante’s rhythms. This is an unexplored area, but one that must become known. Whoever says, “Dante is sculptural,” is enslaved by beggarly definitions of a magnificent European. Dante’s poetry is characterized by all the forms of energy known to modern science. Unity of light, sound, and matter constitutes its inner nature. The labor of reading Dante is above all endless, and the more we succeed at it the farther we are from our goal. If the first reading results only in shortness of breath and wholesome fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss boots with hobnails. The question occurs to me—and quite seriously—how many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy?

  The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape.

  The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the beginning of prosody. In order to indicate walking he uses a multitude of varied and charming turns of phrase.

  In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet. Even standing still is a variety of accumulated motion; making a space for people to stand and talk takes as much trouble as scaling an alp. The metrical foot of his poetry is the inhalation; the exhalation is the step. The step draws a conclusion, invigorates, syllogizes.