Osip Mandelstam Read online

  Let us begin with the writing. The pen draws calligraphic letters, it traces out proper and common nouns. A pen is a small piece of bird’s flesh. Of course Dante, who never forgets the origin of things, remembers this. His technique of writing in broad strokes and curves grows into the figured flight of flocks of birds.

  E come augelli surti di riviera,

  quasi congratulando a lor pasture,

  fanno di sè or tonda or altra schiera,

  si dentro ai lumi sante creature

  volitando cantavano, e faciensi

  or D, or I, or L, in sue figure.35

  (Paradiso, XVIII, 73–78)

  Just as the letters under the hand of the scribe, who is obedient to the one who dictates and stands outside literature, as a finished product, are lured to the decoy of meaning, as to an inviting forage, so exactly do birds, magnetized by green grass—now separately, now together—peck at what they find, now forming a circle, now stretching out into a line.

  Writing and speech are incommensurate. Letters correspond to intervals. Old Italian grammar—just as our Russian one—is always that same fluttering flock of birds, that same motley Tuscan schiera, that is, the Florentine mob, which changes laws like gloves, which forgets by evening the decrees promulgated that same morning for the public welfare.

  There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence.

  XI.

  Let us turn again to the question of Dantean coloring.

  The interior of a mountain crystal, Aladdin’s expanse concealed within it, the lanternlike, lamplike, the candelabralike suspension of the piscine rooms implicit within it—this is the best of keys to a comprehension of the Comedy’s coloring.

  A mineralogical collection is a most excellent organic commentary to Dante.

  I permit myself a little autobiographical confession. Black Sea pebbles, tossed up by the surf, were of great help to me when the conception of this talk was ripening. I consulted frankly with the chalcedony, the cornelian, crystallized gypsum, spar, quartz, etc. I understood then that a stone is a kind of diary of the weather, a meteorological concentrate as it were. A stone is nothing but weather excluded from atmospheric space and put away in functional space. In order to understand this, it is necessary to imagine that all geological changes and displacements can be resolved completely into elements of the weather. In this sense, meteorology is more basic than mineralogy: it encompasses it, washes over it, it ages and gives meaning to it.

  The delightful pages which Novalis36 devotes to miners and mining make specific the interconnection of stone and culture and, by causing culture to grow like a rock formation, illumine it out of the stone-weather.

  A stone is an impressionistic diary of weather, accumulated by millions of years of disasters, but it is not only the past, it is also the future: there is periodicity in it. It is Aladdin’s lamp penetrating into the geologic murk of future times.

  In combining the uncombinable, Dante altered the structure of time or, perhaps, the other way around: he was forced to resort to a glossolalia of facts, to a synchronism of events, names, and traditions separated by centuries, precisely because he heard the overtones of time.

  The method chosen by Dante is one of anachronism, and Homer, who appears with a sword at his side, in company with Vergil, Horace, and Lucan, from the dim shadow of the pleasant Orphic choirs, where the four together while away a tearless eternity in literary discussion, is its best expression.

  Evidences of the standing-still of time in Dante are not only the round astronomical bodies, but absolutely all things and all persons’ characters. Anything automatic is alien to him. He is disdainful of causality: such prophecies are fit for bedding down swine.

  Faccian le bestie fiesolane strame

  di lor medesme, e non tocchin la pianta,

  s’alcuna surge ancor nel lor letame.37

  (Inferno, XV, 73–75)

  If I were asked bluntly, “What is a Dantean metaphor?” I would answer, “I don’t know,” for a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically—and this can be substantiated scientifically. But it seems to me that Dante’s metaphor designates the standing-still of time. Its root is not in the little word how, but in the word when. His quando sounds like come. Ovid’s rumbling is closer to him than the French eloquence of Vergil.

  Again and again I turn to the reader and ask him to “imagine” something, that is, I resort to analogy, which has a single goal: to fill up the insufficiency of our system of definition.

  So, imagine that the patriarch Abraham and King David, and all of Israel, including Isaac, Jacob, and all their kinsmen, and Rachel, for whom Jacob endured so much, have entered into a singing and roaring organ, as into a house with the door ajar, and have disappeared within.

  And our forefather Adam with his son Abel, and old Noah, and Moses the giver and obeyer of the law had entered into it even earlier.

  Trasseci l’ombra del primo parente,

  d’Abèl suo figlio, e quella di Noè,

  di Moisè legista e obediente;

  Abraàm patriarca, e Davìd re,

  Israèl con lo padre, e co’ suoi nati,

  e con Rachele, per cui tanto fè.38

  (Inferno, IV, 55–60)

  And after this the organ acquires the ability to move—all its pipes and bellows become extraordinarily agitated and, raging and storming, it suddenly begins to back away.

  If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly go mad, if the paintings of all schools and masters should suddenly break loose from the nails, should fuse, intermingle, and fill the air of the rooms with futuristic howling and colors in violent agitation, the result then would be something like Dante’s Comedy.

  To wrench Dante away from scholastic rhetoric is to render the whole of European civilization a service of no small importance. I hope centuries of labor will not be required for this, but only joint international efforts will succeed in creating a true anticommentary to the work of many generations of scholiasts, creeping philologues, and pseudobiographers. Lack of respect for the poetic material—which can be comprehended only through the performance of it, only by a conductorial flight—was precisely the reason for the general blindness to Dante, to the greatest master-manager of this material, to European art’s greatest conductor, who by many centuries anticipated the formation of an orchestra adequate—to what?—to the integral of the conductor’s baton.

  Calligraphic composition realized by means of improvisation: such is the approximate formula of a Dantean impulse, taken simultaneously both as a flight and as something finished. His comparisons are articulated impulses.

  The most complex structural passages of the poem are performed on the fife, on a birdcall. Almost always the fife is sent out ahead.

  Here I have in mind Dante’s introductions, released by him as if they were trial balloons.

  Quando si parte il giuoco della zara,

  colui che perde si riman dolente,

  ripetendo le volte, e tristo impara:

  con l’altro se ne va tutta la gente:

  qual va dinanzi, e qual di retro il prende,

  e qual da lato li si reca a mente.

  EI non s’arresta, e questo e quello intende;

  a cui porge la man, più non fa pressa;

  e così dalla calca si difende.

  (Purgatorio, VI, 1–9)

  When the dice game is finished, the loser in sad solitude replays the game, dejectedly throwing the dice. The whole crowd dogs the footsteps of the lucky gambler: one runs out ahead, one plucks at him from behind, one curries favor asking to be remembered; but fortune’s favorite continues on, he listens to all alike, and by shaking hands, he frees himself from the importunate hangers-on.

  And thus the “street” song of the Purgatorio—with its crush of importunate Florentine souls who desire gossip first, intercession second, and then gossip again—proceeds in the bir
dcall of genre, on the typical Flemish fife that became painting only three hundred years later.

  Another curious consideration suggests itself: the commentary (explanatory) is an integral structural part of the Comedy itself. The miracle ship left the shipyard with barnacles sticking to it. The commentary is derived from the hubbub of the streets, from rumor, from hundred-mouthed Florentine slander. It is unavoidable, like the halcyon hovering behind Batiushkov’s ship.39

  There, there, look: old Marzzuco—how well he bore himself at his son’s burial! A remarkably courageous old man. . . . And do you know, they were quite wrong to chop off the head of Pietro de la Broccia—they had nothing on himA woman’s evil hand is implicated here. . . . By the way, there he is himself—Let’s go up and ask.

  Poetic material has no voice. It does not paint and it does not express itself in words. It knows no form, and by the same token it is devoid of content for the simple reason that it exists only in performance. The finished work is nothing but a calligraphic product, the inevitable result of the performing impulse. If a pen is dipped into an inkwell, the work created, stopped in its tracks, is nothing but a stock of letters, fully commensurate with the inkwell.

  In talking of Dante, it is more proper to have in mind the generation of impulses and not the generation of forms: impulses to textiles, to sails, to scholastics, to meteorology, to engineering, to municipalities, to artisans and craftsmen, a list that could be continued ad infinitum.

  In other words, the syntax confuses us. All nominative cases should be replaced by datives of direction. This is the law of reversible and convertible poetic material, which exists only in the performing impulse.

  —Everything is here turned inside out: the substantive is the goal, and not the subject of the sentence. It is my hope that the object of Dante scholarship will become the coordination of the impulse and the text.

  Note

  Note: This translation was originally published as “Talking about Dante” in Delos, no. 6 (1971): 65–107. A few minor editorial changes have been made in the interest of conformity with the other essays in this volume, and endnotes have been added.

  *A. Kars, Istorija orkestrovki [History of orchestration] (Muzgiz, 1932). (Brown and Hughes’ note.)

  About Poetry

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  The sketches that form the present collection were written at various times, between 1910 and 1923. They are linked by a certain kinship of thought.

  Not one of these excerpts attempts definitive literary characterization; literary themes and patterns serve only as graphic examples. Those of my incidental essays that do not share this common bond have not been included in this collection.

  O. M.

  1928

  The Word & Culture

  There is grass in the streets of Petersburg, the first runner-sprouts of the virgin forest that will cover the space of contemporary cities. This bright, tender greenery, with its astonishing freshness, belongs to a new, inspired nature. Petersburg is really the most advanced city in the world. The race to modernity isn’t measured by subways or skyscrapers; but by the speed with which the sprightly grass pushes its way out from under the city stones.

  Our blood, our music, our political life—all this will find its continuity in the tender being of a new nature, a nature-Psyche. In this kingdom of the spirit without man every tree will be a dryad, and every phenomenon will speak of its own metamorphosis.

  Bring it to a stop? But why? Who will stop the sun as he sweeps in summer harness to his paternal home, seized by a passion for returning? Rather than beg alms from him, isn’t it better to favor him with a dithyramb?

  He understood nothing

  And he was weak and shy as children are,

  Strangers trapped wild animals

  And caught fish for him . . .1

  Thanks to you, “strangers,” for such touching concern, for such tender care of the old world, which is no longer “of this world,” which has withdrawn into itself in expectation of and preparation for the coming metamorphosis:

  Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,

  Quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit,

  Cum repeto noctem, qua tot mihi cara reliquit,

  Labitur ex oculis nunc quoque guttameis.2

  Yes, the old world is “not of this world,” yet it is more alive than it has ever been. Culture has become the Church. There has been a separation of Church (i.e., culture) and State. Secular life no longer concerns us; we no longer eat a meal, we take a sacrament; we do not live in a room but a cell; we do not dress, we attire ourselves in garments. At last we have found our inner freedom, real inner joy. We drink water in clay jugs as if it were wine, and the sun likes a refectory better than a restaurant. Apples, bread, the potato—from now on they will appease not merely physical but spiritual hunger as well. The Christian—and every cultivated man is a Christian now—knows not a merely physical hunger or a merely spiritual nourishment. For him, the word is also flesh, and simple bread is happiness and mystery.

  Social distinctions and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into friends and enemies of the word. Literally, sheep and goats. I sense, almost physically, the unclean goat smell issuing from the enemies of the word. Here, the argument that arrives last in the course of any serious disagreement is fully appropriate: my opponent smells bad.

  The separation of culture from the state is the most significant event of our revolution. The process of the secularization of our political life has not stopped with the separation of church and state as the French Revolution understood it. Our social upheaval has brought a deeper secularization. The state now displays to culture that curious attitude we might best call tolerance. But at the same time, there is a new kind of organic connection binding the state to culture as the appanage princes used to be linked to the monasteries. The princes would support the monasteries for the sake of their counsel. That says all. The state’s exclusion from cultural values places it in full dependence on culture. Cultural values ornament political life, endow it with color, form, and, if you will, even with sex. Inscriptions on government buildings, tombs, gates safeguard the state from the ravages of time.

  Poetry is the plow that turns up time so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appear on top. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not content with the present, longing for time’s deeper layers, like the plowman, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably tends to Classicism. Not because David3 reaped Robespierre’s harvest, but because that is how the earth would have it.

  One often hears: that might be good, but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday hasn’t been born yet. It has not yet really come to pass. I want Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus afresh, and I will not be satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, Catullus.

  In fact, it’s amazing how everybody keeps fussing over the poets and can’t seem to have done with them. You might think, once they’d been read, that was that. Superseded, as they say now. Nothing of the sort. The silver horn of Catullus—“Ad claras Asiae volemus urbes”4—frets and excites more powerfully than any futuristic mystification. It doesn’t exist in Russian; and yet it must. I picked a Latin line so the Russian reader would see that it obviously belongs to the category of Duty; the imperative rings more resonantly in it. Yet this is characteristic of any poetry that is Classical. Classical poetry is perceived as that which must be, not as that which has already been.

  Not a single poet has yet appeared. We are free of the weight of memories. For all that, how many rare presentiments: Pushkin, Ovid, Homer. When in the silence a lover gets tangled up in tender names and suddenly remembers that all this has happened before, the words and the hair, and the rooster that crowed outside the window had been crowing in Ovid’s Tristia,5 a deep joy of repetition seizes him, a head-spinning joy—

  Like dark water I drink the dimmed air,

  Time upturned by the plow; that rose was once the earth.

  So tha
t poet, too, has no fear of repetition and gets easily drunk on Classical wine.

  What is true of a single poet is true of all. There’s no point forming schools of any kind. There’s no point inventing one’s own poetics.

  The analytic method, applied to style, movement, form, is altogether a legitimate and ingenious approach. Lately, demolition has become a purely formal artistic premise. Disintegration, decay, rot—all this is still décadence. But the Decadents were Christian artists; in their own way, the last Christian martyrs. For them, the music of decay was the music of resurrection. Baudelaire’s “Charogne” is a sublime example of Christian despair. Deliberate demolition of form is quite another matter. Painless suprematism. A denial of the shape of appearances. Calculated suicide, for the sake of mere curiosity. You can take it apart, or you can put it together: it might seem as though form were being tested, but in fact it’s the spirit rotting and disintegrating. (Incidentally, having mentioned Baudelaire, I would like to recall his significance, as an ascetic hero, in the most authentic Christian sense of the word, a martyr.)

  A heroic era has begun in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. Still hungrier is the state. But there is something even hungrier: time. Time wants to devour the state. Like a trumpet-voice sounds the threat scratched by Derzhavin on his slate board.6 Whoever will raise high the word and show it to time, as the priest does the Eucharist, will be a second Joshua, son of Nun. There is nothing hungrier than the contemporary state, and a hungry state is more terrible than a hungry man. To show compassion for the state which denies the word is the contemporary poet’s civic “way,” the heroic feat that awaits him.

  Let us praise the fateful burden

  Which the people’s leader tearfully bears.

  Let us praise the twilight burden of power,

  Its intolerable weight.

  Whoever has a heart, he must hear, O time,