#255.  “MY HANDS OF WIND, MY TONGUE OF SUN.”  The name and poetry of Osip Mandelstam were largely unknown in the West, I suspect, until 1970, when Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, published Hope Against Hope, thirty years after her husband’s death.  It remains one of the most painful and frightening memoirs of the Stalinist years, with its vivid picture of the lowering and constant threat of interrogation and intimidation practiced by the Russian government on its citizens.  In specific she tells of the persecution, internment, forced relocation and isolation Mandelstam endured, followed by a stint in the labor camps, which finished him off.  “There are indeed circumstances in which it is impossible to display high moral courage.” she writes, and we soon have too much a sense of how any protest, any perceived disobedience, was virtually suicide, and a guarantee of the punishment being shared out to one’s family and friends.  That feeling of complete entrapment is on every page of the book, and is common to any book we read on the Stalin years.

       There’s another, very subject-specific shock lurking in her pages as well. The Canadian poet Margaret Atwood has written, “In this country you can say what you like / because no one will listen to you anyway.”  Osip Mandelstam, in contrast, wrote, “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed.  Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”  Mandelstam’s poems were called terrorist acts, counter-revolutionary crimes.  In many cases the poems survive because people memorized them, knowing they would be confiscated if discovered.   Poets in America know they can write pretty much anything short of direct incitement to violence and nothing will happen.  We cry constantly that no one hears us, reads us, that we go unnoticed.  Maybe we’re luckier than we know.

       Almost all the English-language translations of Mandelstam’s verse date from after the publication of Hope Against Hope, which was widely read.  The closest I’d come to Mandelstam was in the Selected Poems published by Atheneum, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin; I’d been impressed with them, but the top of my head had not quite come off, as it had with Elaine Feinstein’s versions of Tsvetaeva or Judith Hemschemeyer’s versions of Akhmatova.  That decapitating honor went recently to Christian Wiman, whose versions of fifty-one of Mandelstam’s originals were published as Stolen Air by Ecco Press in 2012.   Read Wiman’s versions aloud (and I think you’ll want to) and you will hear the difference; I don’t know how often I’ve read translations that give the feeling of being original to English, or using everything the language puts in your toolkit and voicebox.  The first resemblance you’ll hear, I’d bet, is to Hopkins, but Ilya Kaminsky, who wrote the preface to this collection, suggests that that quality is in Mandelstam’s originals, and not the product of Hopkinesque modernism but of Mandelstam’s devotion to the compression of the Greek poets, to whom he was devoted.

In “My Animal, My Age,” Mandelsam/Wiman give us,

                                    My animal, my age, who alive can gaze

                                    Into those eyes without becoming you?

                                    Who alone can use, like a kind of sacrificial glue,

                                    Words and blood to bind and mend these centuries?

                                    Blood the builder brings forth the future

                                    From the garroted throat of this very hour.

      Listen to the movement, in both vowel and consonant, of:

                                    Mounds of human heads and mine

                                    Among them, unseen, unmarked, unmourned.

                                    But look in lines as cherished as a lover’s scars,

                                    In screams of children who play at wars,

                                    I rise with my hands of wind, my tongue of sun.

      Both Mandelstams, as it happens, had withering things to say about poetry in translation; this has always seemed to me a punitive attitude. For those of us who have no Russian, it’s translation or nothing; and here especially, in Wiman’s versions, we have lines that read as poetry, as poetry of a voice we may never have heard before, and which has the plosive excitement to it that the “news of that stays news” of poetry gives us.

       The last lines of the book:

                                    And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

                                    Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

                                    It was all leaflike and starshower,unerring, self-shattering power,

                                    And it was all aimed at me.

                                    What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?

                                    What is being?  What is truth?

                                    Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,

                                    All hover and hammer,

                                    Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

                                    It is now.  It is not.