Biting into Glass

to Valentin Belinsky In the Second Moscow Notebook, written between May 1932 and February 1934, Osip Mandelstam wrote this warning to himself and all would-be translators: Don't tempt yourself with foreign languages-try to forget them: after all you won't be able to bite through glass with your teeth.1 Nevertheless, since the early Sixties, and particularly since the early Seventies, so many translations of Mandelstam have appeared that those without Russian can now read English versions of virtually everything he wrote in both poetry and prose. The first English translation of Mandelstam was published in 1929, in Russian Poems, an anthology edited by C. ft Coxwell. In 1943 C. M. Bowra included him in A Book of Russian Verse, and Babette Deutsch's translations appeared in Avraham Yarmolinsky's anthology, A Treasury of Russian Verse, in 1949. Peter Russell published a Selected Poems in 1958. Dmitri Obolensky's The Penguin Book of Russian Verse of 1961 had ten poems by Mandelstam, who was again generously represented with translations by Stanley Kunitz, Rose Styron, W S. Merwin, and Robert Lowell in Olga Carlisle's well-known anthology, Poets on Street Corners: Portraits of Fifteen Russian Poets in 1968. The Collected Works, published in 1955, has since then been revised and updated, and more recent years have seen translations of both clusters of selected poems and whole collections. English-language criticism and scholarship on Mandelstam has kept pace with the translations and often provides commentary of a high order. All the same, the problems that plague translation in general keenly stalk the poetry of Mandelstam in English. There is, first of all, the difficulty of bringing across his prosodic effects. Mandelstam routinely employs meter and rhyme, the latter often with the most subtle pairings and exquisite echoes. In addition there are countless other auditory nuances, many of them impossible to render in English. For example, the penultimate stanza of the early and haunting "Silentium" contains a line in which the word for heart, serdtsa, is repeated, but with two different case endings, a and e, so that the line runs "i serdtse serdtsa ustidis." This means, according to one translation, "My heart, you must spurn hearts," and, according to another, "And heart, be ashamed of heart." Neither is a satisfying equivalent for the slight yet crucial arterial branching achieved by Mandelstam's shift of one letter (and one case) into another. No less challenging is his imagery. Sometimes clear, as in the bitterly diagnostic and prophetic "January 1, 1924," it is at other times almost impenetrably complex, as in "The Slate Ode," a poem that, David McDuff tells us, "aroused violent hostility on the part of Mandelstam's Soviet critics who accused him of deliberate obscurity," and that "seems to indicate the poet's desire to hide himself from the world in hard, clipped imagery." Mandelstam resists paraphrase, for which he had nothing but contempt: "For where there is amenability to paraphrase," he wrote in "Conversation About Dante," "there the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night." Reading him can make you feel as if you were pursuing a dazzling white unicorn through a forest at midnight. You can never catch up, while the meanings flash, glimmer, and tease you on. As a high modernist, he kneads language like dough, self-consciously stretching and punching it in many directions. Figures connect, dissolve, and regroup, as in the third and fourth stanzas of "The Slate Ode" (in Clarence Brown's and W S. Merwin's fine translation): Steep goat cities. The massive layering of flint. And still the beds, the sheep churches, the villages. In the plumbline is their sermon, in the water their lesson, time wears them fine, and the transparent forest of the air has been filled with them for a long time. …