Osip Mandelstam Read online

  How your boat goes to the bottom . . .7

  One shouldn’t demand of poetry any special quiddity, concreteness, materiality. It’s that very same revolutionary hunger. The doubt of Thomas. Why should one have to touch it with the fingers? But the main point is, why should the word be identified with the thing, with the grass, with the object that it signifies?

  Is the thing master of the word? The word is a Psyche. The living word does not signify an object, but freely chooses, as though for a dwelling place, this or that objective significance, materiality, some beloved body. And around the thing the word hovers freely, like a soul around a body that has been abandoned but not forgotten.

  What’s been said of materiality sounds somewhat different applied to imagery: “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!”8

  Write imageless poems if you can, if you know how. A blind man will recognize a beloved face by just barely having touched it with his seeing fingers; and tears of joy, the authentic joy of recognition, will spurt from his eyes after a long separation. The poem is alive through an inner image, that resounding mold of form, which anticipates the written poem. Not a single word has appeared, but the poem already resounds. What resounds is the inner image; what touches it is the poet’s aural sense.

  “And the flash of recognition alone is sweet to us!”9

  These days, something like glossolalia manifests itself. In sacred frenzy, poets speak in the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as a room where a man is dying is opened to all, so the door of the old world is flung wide before the crowd. Suddenly everything has become common property. Come in and help yourself. Everything’s available: all the labyrinths, all the hiding places, all the forbidden paths. The word has become, not a seven-stop, but a thousand-stop reed, instantly animated by the breathing of all the ages. In glossolalia the most striking thing is that the speaker does not know the language in which he speaks. He speaks in a totally obscure tongue. And to everyone, and to him, too, it seems he’s talking Greek or Babylonian. It is something quite the reverse of erudition. Contemporary poetry, for all its complexity and its inner violence, is naïve: “Ecoutez la chanson grise . . .”10

  A synthetic poet of modern life would seem to me to be not a Verhaeren, but a kind of Verlaine of culture. For him the whole complexity of the old world would be like that same old Pushkinian reed. In him, ideas, scientific systems, political theories would sing, just as nightingales and roses used to sing in his predecessors. They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces. One has to sow wheat in the ether.

  Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution.

  Note

  Note: This translation was originally published in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).

  Attack

  I.

  What poetry needs is Classicism, what poetry needs is Hellenism, what poetry needs is a heightened sense of imagery, the rhythm of the machine, urban collectivism, peasant folklore . . . Poor poetry! Under the muzzle of these unmitigated demands now being leveled at her, she shies. What should poetry be like? Well, maybe poetry shouldn’t be like anything, maybe poetry doesn’t owe anybody anything, and maybe these creditors of hers are all fraudulent! Nothing comes easier than talk about what art needs: first of all, it’s always arbitrary and commits nobody to anything; second, it provides an inexhaustible theme for philosophizing; third, it relieves people of a rather unpleasant obligation that not everybody is up to—gratitude for what is. It relieves them from the most commonplace gratitude for what a given time has to offer as poetry.

  O monstrous ingratitude: to Kuzmin, to Mayakovsky, to Khlebnikov, Aseev, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sologub, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilev, Khodasevich1—quite different as they are, made of different clay. They aren’t, after all, simply the Russian poets of yesterday or today; they are for all time. God wasn’t humiliating us when he gave us the likes of these. A people does not choose its poets, just as no one ever chooses his own parents. A people that does not know how to honor its poets deserves . . . Well, it deserves nothing. You might just say it is irrelevant. Yet what a difference between the pure ignorance of the people and the half-knowledge of the ignorant fop. The Hottentots, to test their old men, would make them climb a tree. Then they would shake the tree: if the old man had grown so weak he fell out of the tree, that meant he had to be killed. The snob imitates the Hottentots; his favored method recalls the ritual I have just described. To this, I think the proper response is contempt. We must distinguish between those who are interested in poetry and those who are interested in a Hottentot amusement.

  Nothing favors the contagion of snobbery more than frequent change in the generations of poets, given one and the same generation of readers. The reader gets used to feeling himself an observer in the parterre. Before him file the changing schools. He frowns, grimaces, acts capriciously. Finally, he begins to feel an altogether unfounded sense of his own superiority—of the constant before the ephemeral, of the immobile before the mobile. The rapid change of poetic schools in Russia has sent one and the same reader reeling.

  The reading generation of the nineties turned out to be insubstantial, utterly incompetent in poetry. For this reason, the Symbolists long awaited their readers and, by strength of circumstances, by their intellect, their education and maturity, seemed much older than the callow youth to whom they turned. The first decade of the twentieth century, judging by the decadence of public taste, was not much higher than the nineties, and along with The Scales,2 that militant citadel of the new school, we had the illiterate tradition of the “Wild Rose” group [Shipovniki], the monstrous almanac literature, with its coarse and ignorant pretentiousness.

  As individual and highly polished poems appeared out of the great womb of Symbolism, as the tribe disintegrated and a kingdom of the poetic person ensued, the reader who’d been educated on tribal poetry of the Symbolist sort—that womb of all new Russian poetry—grew distraught in a world of blossoming diversity where everything would no longer fit under the tribal hat, where every person stood bareheaded and apart. After this tribal period, which infused new blood and proclaimed an exceptionally capacious canon, after a dense medley that triumphed in the rich, deep bell-ringing of Viacheslav Ivanov, came the time of the person, of personality. Yet all of contemporary Russian poetry came out of the tribal Symbolist womb. The reader has a short memory, and is unwilling to acknowledge this. O acorns, acorns! who needs an oak when we have acorns.3

  II.

  Somebody once managed to photograph the eye of a fish. The picture showed a railroad bridge and several details of the landscape, but the optical law of fish-vision showed all this in an improbably distorted manner. If somebody managed to photograph the poetic eye of Academician Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky4 or of the average member of the Russian intelligentsia, how for example he sees his Pushkin, the result would be a picture no less unexpected than the world seen by the fish.

  Distortion of the poetic work in the perception of the reader is an inevitable social phenomenon, difficult and useless to combat: easier to bring electrification to Russia than to teach all literate readers to read Pushkin as he is written, rather than as their emotional needs require and their intellectual capacities permit.

  As distinct from musical notation, for example, poetic notation leaves a fairly big gap, the absence of a large number of signs, indications, pointers, implications, which alone make the text comprehensible and coherent. Yet all these nonexistent signs are no less precise than musical notes or dance-hieroglyphs; the poetically literate reader supplies them on his own, eliciting them from the text itself, so speak.

  Poetic literacy does not in any case coincide with ordinary literacy, with reading the alphabet, or even with literary erudition. If the percentage of ordinary and literary illiteracy is very high in Russia, poetic illiteracy is absolutely abysmal, and all the worse for being confused with ordinary illiteracy, so that anyone who knows how to read is considered poetically literate. The abov
e has a special relevance to the half-educated mass of our intelligentsia, infected by snobbism, having lost their native feeling for the language, essentially rendered languageless, amorphous in relation to language, tickling their long-dulled language-nerves with cheap and easy stimuli, dubious lyricisms and neologisms, often alien and hostile to the essence of Russian speech.

  It is the demands of this milieu, declassed in the linguistic sense, that current Russian poetry is obliged to satisfy.

  The word, born in the most profound layers of speech-consciousness, has to serve the deaf-mutes and tongue-tied, the cretins and degenerates of the word.

  Symbolism’s great merit, the correct stance it took with regard to the Russian reading public, was in its pedagogy, in its inborn sense of authority, the patriarchal weightiness and legislative gravity with which it educated the reader.

  One needs to put the reader in his place, and along with him the critic he has reared. Criticism should not consist of the arbitrary interpretation of poetry; this should give way to objective, scholarly research, to the scholarship of poetry.

  Perhaps the most comforting thing in the whole situation of Russian poetry is the deep and pure ignorance, the unknowingness of the people about their own poetry.

  The masses, who have preserved a healthy philological sense, those layers where the morphology of language begins to sprout, strengthen, and develop, have quite simply not yet entered into contact with individualist Russian poetry. The Russian lyric has not yet found its readers. Perhaps it will find them only after the extinction of those poetic luminaries that have already sent out their rays of light to this distant and as yet unattained destination.

  About an Interlocutor

  What is there about a madman, tell me, that produces the most frightening impression of madness? The distended pupils—because they are unseeing, because they focus on nothing in particular, because they are empty. Or his mad speeches, because, even while turning to you, the madman does not take you into account, does not consider your existence, as if he did not wish to acknowledge it, because he is absolutely uninterested in you. In the madman, we fear for the most part that uncanny, absolute indifference that he turns toward us. Nothing frightens a man more than another man who has no concern for him. There is deep significance in that cultivated pretense, that politeness, we continually use in order to emphasize a certain interest in each other.

  When a man has something to say, he usually goes to people, seeks out listeners. But a poet does the opposite. He runs “to shores of desert waves, to deep-sounding groves.” The abnormality is obvious . . . A suspicion of madness falls on the poet. And people are right when they call him mad, who addresses inanimate objects, nature, and not his living brothers. And they would be in the right to recoil from the poet as from a madman if his word were not really addressed to anyone. But this is not the case.

  The view of the poet as “God’s creature” is very dangerous and basically incorrect. There is no reason to think that Pushkin, for instance, in his little song about the bird,1 had the poet in mind. But even with regard to Pushkin’s bird, the case isn’t really so simple. Before it can sing forth, it “heeds the voice of God.” Obviously he who orders the bird to sing listens to it. The bird “shook its wings and sang” because it was bound by a “natural contract” with God—an honor to which even a poet of the greatest genius dares not aspire . . . To whom then does the poet speak? It’s a disturbing question, and very contemporary, because to this very day the Symbolists have avoided posing it sharply. Symbolism completely neglected the, as it were, contractual relationship, the mutuality that accompanies an act of speech. (I speak, and that means I am listened to, and not for nothing, not out of kindness, but because there is an obligation.) The Symbolist poets turned their attention exclusively to acoustics. They hurled sound into the architecture of the soul and, with that self-absorption characteristic of them, followed the sound’s meanderings through the archways of another person’s psychology. They would reckon up the sonic increment issuing from good acoustics and call this computation magic. In this regard Symbolism recalls “Prestre Martin” of the medieval French proverb, who himself serves Mass and listens to it. The Symbolist poet is not only a musician, he’s a Stradivarius at the same time, the great artisan of the violin, preoccupied with estimating the proportion of the “box” in relation to the psychology of the listener. It is precisely depending on these proportions that the stroke of the bow either acquires a regal fullness or tends to sound squalid and unconvincing. Yet, gentlemen, a piece of music nevertheless exists independently of the player or the instrument or the place! Why then should the poet be so anxiety-ridden about the future? Where finally is that supplier of living violins for the poet’s needs—those listeners whose psychic apparatus is up to Stradivarius’ “helix”? We don’t know, we never know where such listeners might turn up . . . François Villon wrote for the Parisian rabble of the mid-fifteenth century, yet we find in his poems a living charm . . .

  Everybody has friends. Why doesn’t the poet turn to his friends, to those people who are naturally close to him? The shipwrecked sailor throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment, and it has his name in it and what happened to him. Many years later, walking along the dunes, I find it in the sand, I read the letter, I learn when it happened, the testament of the deceased. I had a right to do this. I did not unseal someone else’s letter. The letter sealed in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, then, that I am its secret addressee.

  My gift is poor, nor loudly rings my voice

  And yet I live—and on the earth, my being

  Means something dear to someone:

  My distant heir will find it

  In my verses; who can tell? my soul

  Will turn out to be bound with his in tie

  And as in my generation I found a friend

  So will I find a reader in posterity.

  Reading Boratynsky’s2 poem I have the same feeling I would have if such a bottle had come into my hands. The ocean in all its vastness has risen to help it fulfill its designation, and the finder cannot escape a certain feeling of providentiality. In the sailor’s flinging a bottle into the flow of the sea and in Boratynsky’s poem there is a certain common bond. Like the poem, the letter isn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Nevertheless, both have an addressee: the letter’s is the person who will accidentally notice the bottle in the sand; the poem’s is “a reader in posterity.” What reader, I wonder, could look on these lines of Boratynsky without a sudden start and an uncanny shiver of joy, as happens sometimes when one is called unexpectedly by name?

  Balmont3 declares:

  I do not know a wisdom fit for others,

  What I carve in verse is only transience.

  In everything transient I see whole worlds,

  Changing with the play of rainbows.

  Do not curse me, wise men, what am I to you?

  Why I’m only a cloud full of fire,

  Why I’m only a cloud—see, I float

  And I call to dreamers—it’s not you I call.

  The unpleasant obsequious tone of these lines presents a curious contrast to the deep and modest dignity of Boratynsky’s verses. Balmont justifies himself, apologizing as it were. Unforgivable! Intolerable for a poet! The only thing that cannot be forgiven! For poetry is the consciousness of one’s own rightness. In the given instance, Balmont lacks such a consciousness. He has clearly lost his foothold. The first line kills the whole poem. Right off the poet emphatically declares that we are of no interest to him: “I do not know a wisdom fit for others . . .”

  To his surprise, we pay him back in the same coin: if we are not interesting to you, you do not interest us. Who cares about your cloud; a lot of clouds float by . . . Real clouds have this advantage: they don’t jeer at people. Rejection of an “interlocutor” passes like a red thread through all of Balmont’s poetry and greatly diminishes its value. In his poems, Balmont is always sl
ighting somebody, looking down his nose at him, contemptuously. This “somebody” is the secret interlocutor. Neither understood nor acknowledged by Balmont, he in turn takes a cruel revenge on the poet. When we speak, we search our interlocutor’s face for a sanction, for a confirmation of our rightness. A poet does it even more so. In Balmont the precious consciousness of poetic rightness is often missing, because he does not have a constant interlocutor. From this lack spring two unpleasant extremes in Balmont’s poetry: his obsequiousness and his insolence. Balmont’s insolence is unreal, inauthentic. His need for self-assertion is quite pathological. He cannot say “I” sotto voce. He screams “I.” “I am”—an abrupt pause,—“I who play thunder.” In Balmont’s poetry, the “I” has definitely and unfairly tipped the scales against the “non-I” as if it were so much fluff. Balmont’s shrill individualism is unpleasant. This is not the quiet solipsism of Sologub, offensive to nobody, but individualism at the expense of someone else’s “I.” Note how Balmont loves to catch you by surprise with his direct and harsh “thou”: in these passages he is like a bad hypnotist. Balmont’s “thou” never finds an addressee, whizzing past like an arrow that has burst loose from a too tight bow-string.

  And as in my generation I found a friend

  So will I find a reader in posterity.

  Boratynsky’s penetrating gaze goes beyond his generation—though he has friends in his generation—in order to pause at some unknown yet definite “reader.” And anyone who happens to come across Boratynsky’s poems feels himself to be such a “reader,” chosen, called to by name . . . Why not a living, concrete interlocutor, why not a “representative of the epoch,” why not a “friend in my generation”? I answer: addressing a concrete interlocutor takes the wings off the verse, deprives it of air, of flight. The air of a poem is the unexpected. Addressing someone known, we can say only what is known. It’s a solid, authoritative psychological law. One cannot emphasize too strongly its significance for poetry.