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EYESIGHT OF WASPS
Briefly traces the Russian poet's life and presents translations of his poems about mortality, silence, nature, chance, politics, and exile
- GenresPoetry
141 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 1989
About the author
Osip Mandelstam
300 books249 followersOsip Emilyevich Mandelstam (also spelled Osip Mandelshtam, Ossip Mandelstamm) (Russian: Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 7, 2022
I'm tired to death of life,
I welcome nothing it can give me,
But I adore my naked earth:
There's no other one to see.
What shall I do with the body I've been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?
An inexpressible sadness
Opened two big eyes.
The ear-drums stretch their sensitive sail,
Eyes - dilating - glaze,
An unsinging choir of midnight birds
Swim across the silence.
I am as poor as nature,
As naked as the sky,
And my freedom is spectral
Like the voice of the midnight birds.
I see the unbreathing moon
And a sky deader than a canvas;
You strange and morbid world
I welcome, emptiness!
When asked the time,
His answer was "Eternity".
But the more attentively I studied,
Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold,
The more I thought: I too one day shall create
Beauty from cruel weight.
Herds of horses graze or gaily neigh,
The valley rusts like Rome;
Time's translucent rapids wash away
A classical Spring's dry gold.
I woke in a radiant cradle,
Lit by a black sun.
It's easier to raise a rock than to know your essence!
I'm left with one aim only, a golden one:
To free myself from the burden of time.
I was washing at night in the courtyard -
The sky's harsh stars shone out.
Starlight, like salt on an axe-head -
The rain-butt, brim-full, had frozen.
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There's scarcely anything
Purer than the truth of a clean towel.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death more lucid, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;
Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.
One more I want to rustle
Something out of nothing -
To blaze like a match, shoulder the night, wake it up.
The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,
The hayloft's ancient chaos
Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.
Rustling through the trees like a green ball-game;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.
Let's be grateful for what we had:
I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.
The era rang like a golden sphere,
Cast, hollow, supported by no one.
Touched, it answered yes and no,
As a child will say:
I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one;
Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.
Moscow sleeps, like a wooden box,
And there's nowhere to run from the tyrant-epoch...
Snow, as of old, smells of apples.
I want to escape from my own doorway.
Where to? The street is dark
And conscience shows up ahead of me, white,
Like salt scattered on a pavement.
Why does this city still retain
Its ancient rights over my thoughts and feelings?
I shall not return my borrowed dust to the earth,
Like a white, floury butterfly.
I desire this thinking body
To turn into a street, a country -
This vertebral, charred flesh,
Conscious of its span.
I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark,
I've gone into the depths of time -
And found it numb.
Forgive me for what I'm saying;
Read it aloud to me quietly.
I welcome nothing it can give me,
But I adore my naked earth:
There's no other one to see.
What shall I do with the body I've been given,
So much at one with me, so much my own?
An inexpressible sadness
Opened two big eyes.
The ear-drums stretch their sensitive sail,
Eyes - dilating - glaze,
An unsinging choir of midnight birds
Swim across the silence.
I am as poor as nature,
As naked as the sky,
And my freedom is spectral
Like the voice of the midnight birds.
I see the unbreathing moon
And a sky deader than a canvas;
You strange and morbid world
I welcome, emptiness!
When asked the time,
His answer was "Eternity".
But the more attentively I studied,
Notre Dame, your monstrous ribs, your stronghold,
The more I thought: I too one day shall create
Beauty from cruel weight.
Herds of horses graze or gaily neigh,
The valley rusts like Rome;
Time's translucent rapids wash away
A classical Spring's dry gold.
I woke in a radiant cradle,
Lit by a black sun.
It's easier to raise a rock than to know your essence!
I'm left with one aim only, a golden one:
To free myself from the burden of time.
I was washing at night in the courtyard -
The sky's harsh stars shone out.
Starlight, like salt on an axe-head -
The rain-butt, brim-full, had frozen.
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There's scarcely anything
Purer than the truth of a clean towel.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death more lucid, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;
Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.
One more I want to rustle
Something out of nothing -
To blaze like a match, shoulder the night, wake it up.
The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,
The hayloft's ancient chaos
Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.
Rustling through the trees like a green ball-game;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.
Let's be grateful for what we had:
I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.
The era rang like a golden sphere,
Cast, hollow, supported by no one.
Touched, it answered yes and no,
As a child will say:
I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one;
Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.
Moscow sleeps, like a wooden box,
And there's nowhere to run from the tyrant-epoch...
Snow, as of old, smells of apples.
I want to escape from my own doorway.
Where to? The street is dark
And conscience shows up ahead of me, white,
Like salt scattered on a pavement.
Why does this city still retain
Its ancient rights over my thoughts and feelings?
I shall not return my borrowed dust to the earth,
Like a white, floury butterfly.
I desire this thinking body
To turn into a street, a country -
This vertebral, charred flesh,
Conscious of its span.
I'm ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark,
I've gone into the depths of time -
And found it numb.
Forgive me for what I'm saying;
Read it aloud to me quietly.
Displaying 1 of 1 review