Osip Mandelstam Read online

  The density of the cello timbre is best suited to convey a sense of expectation and of agonizing impatience. There exists no power on earth which could hasten the movement of honey flowing from a tilted glass jar. Therefore the cello could come about and be given form only when the European analysis of time had made sufficient progress, when the thoughtless sundial had been transcended and the one-time observer of the shade stick moving across Roman numerals on the sand had been transformed into a passionate participant of a differential torture and into a martyr of the infinitesimal. A cello delays sound, hurry how it may. Ask Brahms—he knows it. Ask Dante—he has heard it.

  Ugolino’s narrative is one of Dante’s most significant arias, one of those instances when a man, who has been given a unique, never-to-be-repeated chance to be heard out, is completely transformed under the eyes of his audience, plays like a virtuoso on his unhappiness, draws out of his misfortune a timbre never before heard and unknown even to himself.

  It must be remembered that timbre is a structural principle, like the alkalinity or the acidity of this or that chemical compound. The retort is not the space in which the chemical reaction occurs. This would be much too simple.

  The cello voice of Ugolino, overgrown with a prison beard, starving and confined with his three fledgling sons, one of whom bears a sharp, violin name, Anselmuccio, pours out of the narrow slit:

  Breve pertugio dentro dalla muda,30

  (Inferno, XXXIII, 22)

  —it ripens in the box of the prison resonator—here the cello’s fraternization with the prison is no joking matter.

  Il carcere—the prison supplements and acoustically conditions the verbalizing work of the autobiographic cello.

  Prison has played an outstanding role in the subconscious of the Italian people. Nightmares of prison were imbibed with the mother’s milk. The trecento threw men into prison with an amazing unconcern. Common prisons were open to the public, like churches or our museums. The interest in prisons was exploited by the jailers themselves as well as by the fear-instilling apparatus of the small states. Between the prison and the free world outside there existed a lively intercourse, resembling diffusion—the process of osmosis.

  Hence the story of Ugolino is one of the migratory anecdotes, a bugaboo with which mothers frighten children—one of those amusing horrors which are pleasurably mumbled through the night as a remedy for insomnia, as one tosses and turns in bed. By way of ballad it is a well-known type, like Bürger’s Lenore, the Lorelei, or the Erlkönig.

  In such a guise, it corresponds to the glass retort, so accessible and comprehensible irrespective of the quality of the chemical process taking place within.

  But the largo for cello, proffered by Dante on behalf of Ugolino, has its own space and its own structure, which are revealed in the timbre. The ballad-retort, along with the general knowledge of it, is smashed to bits. Chemistry takes over with its architectonic drama.

  “Io non so chi tu se’, nè per che modo

  venuto se ‘qua giù; ma fiorentino

  mi sembri veramente quand’ io t’odo.

  Tu dei saper ch’i ’fui conte Ugolino.”

  (Inferno, XXXIII, 10–13)

  “I do not know who you are or how you came down here, but by your speech you seem to me a real Florentine. You ought to know that I was Ugolino.”

  “You ought to know”—tu dei saper—the first stroke on the cello, the first out-thrusting of the theme.

  The second stroke: “If you do not burst out weeping now, I know not what can wring tears from your eyes.”

  Here are opened up the truly limitless horizons of compassion. What is more, the compassionate one is invited in as a new partner, and already his vibrating voice is heard from the distant future.

  However, it wasn’t by chance I mentioned the ballad: Ugolino’s narrative is precisely a ballad in its chemical make-up, even though it is confined in a prison retort. Present are the following elements of the ballad: the conversation between father and sons (recall the Erlkönig), the pursuit of a swiftness that slips away, that is—continuing the parallel with the Erlkönig—in one instance a mad dash with his trembling son in arms, in the other, the situation in prison, that is, the counting of trickling tempi, which bring the father and his three sons closer to the threshold of death by starvation, mathematically imaginable, but to the father’s mind unthinkable. It is the same rhythm of the race in disguise—in the dampened wailing of the cello, which is struggling with all its might to break out of the situation and which presents an auditory picture of a still more terrible, slow pursuit, decomposing the swiftness into the most delicate fibers.

  Finally, in just the way the cello eccentrically converses with itself and wrings from itself questions and answers, Ugolino’s story is interpolated with his sons’ touching and helpless interjections:

  . . . ed Anselmuccio mio

  disse: “Tu guardi sì, padre: che hai?”

  (Inferno, XXXIII, 50–51)

  . . . and my Anselmuccio said:

  “Father, why do you look so? What is the matter?”

  That is, the timbre is not at all sought out and forced onto the story as onto a shoemaker’s last, but rather the dramatic structure of the narrative arises out of the timbre.

  VIII.

  It seems to me that Dante has carefully studied all speech defects, that he has listened to stutterers and lispers, to whiners and mispronouncers, and that he has learned a good deal from them.

  So I should like to speak about the auditory coloring in Canto XXXII of the Inferno.

  A peculiar labial music: abbo, gabbo, babbo, Tebe, plebe, zebe, converrebbe. As if a wet-nurse were taking part in the creation of the phonetics. Lips now protrude like a child’s, now are distended into a proboscis.

  The labials form a kind of “enciphered bass”—basso continuo, that is, the chordal basis of harmonization. They are joined by smacking, sucking, whistling dentals as well as by clicking and hissing ones.

  At random, I pull out a single strand: cagnazzi, riprezzo, quazzi, mezzo, gravezza . . .

  Not for a second do the tweakings, the smacking, and the labial explosions cease.

  The canto is sprinkled with a vocabulary that I would describe as an assortment of seminary ragging or of the blood thirsty taunting-rhymes of schoolboys: cuticagna (“nape”); dischiomi (“pull out hair, locks of hair”); sonar con le mascella (“to yell,” “to bark”); pigliare a gabbo (“to brag,” “to loaf”). With the aid of this deliberately shameless, intentionally infantile orchestration, Dante forms the crystals for the auditory landscape of Giudecca (Judas’ circle) and Caina (Cain’s circle).

  Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo

  d’inverno la Danoia in Osteric,

  nè Tanaì là sotto il freddo cielo,

  com’era quivi: chè, se Tambernic

  vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,

  non avrìa pur dall’orlo fatto cric.31

  (Inferno, XXXII, 25–30)

  All of a sudden, for no reason at all, a Slavonic duck sets up a squawk: Osteric, Tambernic, cric (an onomatopoeic little word—“crackle”).

  Ice produces a phonetic explosion and it crumbles into the names of the Danube and the Don. The cold-producing draught of Canto XXXII resulted from the entry of physics into a moral idea: from betrayal to frozen conscience to the ataraxy of shame to absolute zero.

  In tempo, Canto XXXII is a modern scherzo. But what kind? An anatomic scherzo that uses the onomatopoeic infantile material to study the degeneration of speech.

  A new link is revealed here: between feeding and speaking. Shameful speaking can be turned back, is turned back to champing, biting, gurgling, to chewing.

  The articulation of feeding and speaking almost coincide. A strange, locust phonetics is created.

  Mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna—

  (Inferno, XXXII, 36)

  —using their teeth like grasshoppers’ mandibles.

  Finally, it is necessary to note
that Canto XXXII is overflowing with anatomical lustfulness.

  “That same famous blow which simultaneously destroyed the wholeness of the body and injured its shadow.” There, too, with a purely surgical pleasure: “He whose jugular vertebra was chopped through by Florence.”

  Di cui segò Fiorenza la gorgiera.

  (Inferno, XXXII, 120)

  And further: “Like a hungry man who greedily falls on bread, one of them fell on another and sank his teeth into the place where the neck and the nape join.”

  Là’ve ‘l cervel s’aggiugne colla nuca.

  (Inferno, XXXII, 129)

  All this jigs like a Dürer skeleton on hinges and takes us to German anatomy.

  After all, a murderer is a bit of an anatomist.

  After all, for the Middle Ages an executioner was a little like a scientific researcher.

  The art of war and the trade of execution are a bit like a dissection amphitheater’s antechamber.

  IX.

  The Inferno is a pawnshop where all the countries and towns known to Dante lie unredeemed. There is a framework for the very powerful structure of the infernal circles. It cannot be conveyed in the form of a funnel. It cannot be represented on a relief map. Hell is suspended on the iron wires of urban egoism.

  It is wrong to conceive of the Inferno as something volumetric, as some combination of enormous circuses, deserts with burning sands, stinking swamps, Babylonian capitals and mosques heated to red-hot incandescence. Hell contains nothing, and it has no volume, the way an epidemic, an infectious disease, or the plague has none; it is like any contagion, which spreads even though it is not spatial.

  Love of the city, passion for the city, hatred of the city—these are the material of the Inferno. The circles of hell are nothing but the Saturn rings of exile. For the exile his sole, forbidden, and for-ever-lost city is scattered everywhere—he is surrounded by it. I should say that the Inferno is surrounded by Florence. The Italian cities in Dante—Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Verona—these dear civic planets—are stretched out into monstrous circles, extended into belts, restored to a nebulous, gaseous state.

  The antilandscape character of the Inferno constitutes as it were the condition of its graphic quality.

  Imagine that grandiose experiment of Foucault’s carried out not with a single pendulum, but with a multitude of crisscrossing pendulums. Here space exists only insofar as it is a receptacle for amplitudes. To make specific Dante’s images is as unthinkable as to enumerate the names of those who took part in the migration of peoples.

  As the Flemish between Wissant and Bruges, fearing the sea’s flood tide, erect dikes to force back the sea, and as the Paduans construct embankments along the quays of the Brenta out of concern for the safety of their cities and bays, and in expectation of spring which melts the snows of the Chiarentana (a part of the snowclad Alps)—such were these dams, albeit not so monumental, whoever the engineer who built them.

  (Inferno, XV, 4–12)

  The moons of the polynomial pendulum swing here from Bruges to Padua, teach a course in European geography, give a lecture on the art of engineering, on the techniques of city safety, on the organization of public works, and on the significance of the alpine watershed for national interests.

  Crawling as we do on our knees before a line of verse, what have we retained from these riches? Where are its godfathers, where its zealots? What are we to do about our poetry, which lags so shamefully behind science?

  It is frightening to think that the blinding explosions of present-day physics and kinetics were put to use six hundred years before their thunder sounded: there are no words to brand the shameful, barbaric indifference to them on the part of the sad compositors of readymade meaning.

  Poetic speech creates its tools on the move and in the same breath does away with them.

  Of all our arts only painting, and at that only modern French painting, still has an ear for Dante. This is the painting which elongates the bodies of the horses approaching the finish line at the race track.

  Whenever a metaphor raises the vegetable colors of existence to an articulate impulse, I remember Dante with gratitude.

  We describe just what cannot be described, that is, nature’s text brought to a standstill; and we have forgotten how to describe the only thing which by its structure yields to poetic representation, namely the impulses, intentions, and amplitudes of oscillation.

  Ptolemy has returned by the back door! . . . Giordano Bruno was burned in vain!

  While still in the womb, our creations are known to each and every one, but Dante’s polynomial, multi-sailed and kinetically incandescent comparisons still retain the charm of that which has been told to no one.

  Amazing is his “reflexology of speech”—the science, still not well established, of the spontaneous psycho-physiological influence of the word on the discussants, the audience, and the speaker himself, and also on the means by which he conveys the impulse to speech, that is, signals by light a sudden desire to express himself.

  Here he approaches closest of all the wave theory of sound and light, he establishes their relationship.

  As a beast, covered with a cloth, is nervous and shudders, and only the moving folds of the material betray its dissatisfaction, thus did the first created soul [Adam’s] express to me through the covering [of light] how pleasant and joyous it was to answer my question.

  (Paradiso, XXVI, 97–102)

  In the third part of the Comedy (the Paradiso) I see a genuine kinetic ballet. Here we have all possible kinds of luminous figures and dances, all the way up to the clacking of heels at a wedding feast.

  Before me four torches burned and the nearest suddenly came to life and became as rosy as if Jupiter and Mars were suddenly to become birds and exchange their plumage.

  (Paradiso, XXVII, 10–15)

  It’s odd, isn’t it: a man, who intends to speak, arms himself with a taut bow, lays up a supply of bearded arrows, prepares mirrors and convex lenses, and squints at the stars like a tailor threading a needle . . .

  I have devised this composite quotation, which is drawn from various passages in the Comedy, to bring into more emphatic relief the speech-preparatory strategies of Dante’s poetry.

  The preparation of speech is even more his sphere than the articulation, that is, than speech itself.

  Recall the marvelous supplication which Vergil addresses to the wiliest of Greeks.

  It is all arippling with the softness of the Italian diphthongs.

  Those curly, ingratiating and sputtering flame-tongues of unprotected lamps, muttering about the oiled wick . . .

  O voi, che siete due dentro ad un foco,

  s’io meritai di voi mentre ch’io vissi,

  s’io meritai di voi assai o poco.32

  (Inferno, XXVI, 79–81)

  Dante determines the origin, fate and character of a man by his voice, just as medical science of his time made diagnoses by the color of urine.

  X.

  He is brimming over with a sense of ineffable gratitude toward the copious richness which is falling into his hands. He has a lot to do: space must be prepared for the influx, the cataract must be removed from rigid vision, care must be taken that the abundance of out-pouring poetic material does not trickle through his fingers, that it does not disappear into an empty sieve.

  Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis,”

  e fior gittando di sopra e dintorno,

  “Manibus o date lilia plenis.”33

  (Purgatorio, XXX, 19–21)

  The secret of his scope is that not a single word of his own is introduced. He is set in motion by everything except fabrication, except inventiveness. Dante and fantasy—why this is incompatible! For shame, French romantics, you miserable incroyables in red vests, slanderers of Alighieri! What fantasy is there in him? He writes to dictation, he is a copyist, a translator. He is bent double in the posture of a scribe who squints in fright at the illuminated original lent him from the prior’s library.
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br />   I think I forgot to say that a hypnotist’s seance was a sort of precondition to the Comedy. This is true, but perhaps overstated. If one takes this amazing work from the viewpoint of written language, from the viewpoint of the independent art of writing, which in 1300 enjoyed equal rights with painting and music and was among the most venerated professions, then to all the earlier suggested analogies a new one can be added—writing down dictation, copying, transcribing.

  Sometimes, very seldom, he shows us his writing tools: A pen is called penna, that is, it participates in a bird’s flight; ink is inchiostro, that is, belonging to a cloister; lines of verse are also called inchiostri, or are designated by the Latin scholastic versi, or, still more modestly, carte, that is, an amazing substitution, pages instead of lines of verse.

  And when it is written down and ready, there is still no full stop, for it must be taken somewhere, it must be shown to someone to be checked and praised.

  To say “copying” is not enough—rather it is calligraphy at the most terrible and impatient dictation. The dictator, the taskmaster, is far more important than the so-called poet.

  . . . I will labor a little more, and then I must show my notebook, drenched with the tears of a bearded schoolboy, to a most strict Beatrice, who radiates not only glory but literacy too.

  Long before Arthur Rimbaud’s alphabet of colors, Dante conjoined color with the full vocalization of articulate speech. But he is a dyer, a textile worker. His ABC is an alphabet of fluttering fabrics tinted with colored powders, with vegetable dyes.

  Sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva

  donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto,

  vestita di color di flamma viva.34

  (Purgatorio, XXX, 31–33)

  His impulses toward colors can be more readily called textile impulses than alphabetic ones. Color for him is displayed only in the fabric. For Dante the highest concentration of material nature, as a substance determined by its coloration, is in textiles. And weaving is the occupation closest to qualitativeness, to quality.

  Now I shall attempt to describe one of the innumerable conductorial flights of Dante’s baton. We shall take this flight as it is, embedded in the actual setting of precious and instantaneous labor.