January 9, 1937
When, among downcast branches
The sorcerer stirs
The whooshing of bay or
Chestnut coats,
The wintering bullfinch—
That faded, lazy knight,
Small but powerful,
Doesn’t want to sing.
Under the overhang of sky,
Under the arch of his brow,
I’ll quickly be seated
In the lilac sled.
January 9, 1937
Hanging around Koltsov
Like a falcon caught in a ring;
No messenger for me,
My house has no stoop.
My ankle tethered to
A blue wood of pine.
The view flung wide open,
A herald without orders.
Hummocks roam the steppe,
And on they go and go
The nights, small nights, overnights—
A transport for the blind.
January 20, 1937
As, somewhere, the sky’s stone wakes the earth,
Knowing no father, falls the fallen verse.
The inexorable is, for the artist, innovation,
Could not be different; and he is judged by no one.
January 21-22, 1937
I hear it clear, the early ice
Rustling under the bridges
And recall the bright hops,
How it floated overhead.
From callous stairs, from city squares
With their blocky palaces
The whole circle of his Florence
Alighieri praised more fiercely
With exhausted lips.
So also my shadow chews
With its eyes that gritty granite,
And sees at night a row of blocks
That in the daytime seemed like houses.
Or my shadow beats around the bush,
And yawns a little in your company.
Or makes noise among the people,
Basking in their wine and sky,
Feeding crumbs of bitter bread
to the ever-nagging swans.
January 24, 1937
I love breathing the frost,
To see breath’s winter confession:
I am I, reality—reality. . .
The boy, red as a lamp,
Small sovereign of his sled,
the boss, sails by.
While I—at quarrel with both world and will—
Indulge the sled’s affliction—
In silvery parentheses, in tassels fringed—
So that the age may fall more lightly
than a squirrel—half the sky in felted boots,
all feet—down to the gentle river.
Voronezh Notebook
Osip Mandelstam
translated from the Russian by John High and Matvei Yankelevich
Click here to read Osip Mandelstam’s poetry from the Spring 2012 issue, and here to read three more poems from the Winter 2013 issue.
With the start of the last of the Voronezh Notebooks, a transformation has begun: In the third year of their exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, Mandelstam’s desperation grows as he becomes increasingly uncertain that he can save himself and his wife, Nadezhda. He has learned about the purges that began after he completed the second notebook. He had heard on the radio news that Kirov's murderers had been "found"—the show trials were in full swing. The Great Terror was beginning, and yet Mandelstam finds consolation, voice, and a paradoxical calm in the plains and white snows of the Black Earth region.
Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 in Warsaw to a well-to-do Jewish family. He studied at the Sorbonne and in Heidelberg before finishing his education in St. Petersburg. In 1913 he published his first book, Stone, after helping found Acmeism (a movement set up in opposition to both Symbolism and Futurism). After the Civil War and the emergence of the new Soviet state, unwilling to change his writing for the sake of the socialist cause, Mandelstam was marginalized as a cultural figure. For a time, he survived with the help of such political and literary figures as Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Pasternak. In 1934 Stalin sent Mandelstam into exile, eventually to the city of Voronezh in central Russia because of a poem in which the poet depicted the dictator’s body in the language of “worms” and “cockroaches.” After interrogations, prisons, exile, and two attempted suicides, Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938.
John High is a poet and translator. The author of eleven books, he is the chief editor of Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry and a former member of the Moscow Poetry Club; his translations include those of Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanov, and Alexei Parschikov. He has been studying and translating Osip Mandelstam for several decades. His most recent book of writings, vanishing acts (2017), completed a tetralogy including here: a poem for billy high 1959-2004 (2006), a book of unknowing (2010), and you are everything you are not (2013), all from Talisman House. He has a book forthcoming from Wet Cement Press in 2020. He has received four Fulbright and two NEA fellowships as well grants from IREX and The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He is a Zen monk in the Soto tradition and is currently living with Andrea Libin in Lisbon.
Matvei Yankelevich has written a number of books, including Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square, 2015), Alpha Donut (United Artists, 2012), and Boris by the Sea (Octopus, 2009). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook, 2007), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets, 2013), which received a National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he has curated the Eastern European Poets Series since 2002. He teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
