A New Translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Tristia'

Osip Mandelstam at the time of his arrest in 1934


On 27 December, it was 75 years since the untimely death of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938). This previously unpublished translation of Mandelstam's 'Tristia' has been kindly contributed by Mark L Mosher, a California-based translator with whom I occasionally correspond about poetry and especially poetry in translation. He has already appeared on the blog as Leif Hendrik, with his translation of Georg Trakl's 'Decline', and he blogs at Nordic Mountain. You can read his translation of 'Tristia' below, as well as the original Russian poem, and Mark's biography.

'Tristia' is a complex, subtle poem beloved of many poets and readers. With its meditation on "the science of parting", it feels very personal, but it is suffused with the uncertainty following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Through its title and subject matter, it also references the Tristia of the Roman poet Ovid, who wrote a series of laments while in exile. The poem contains allusions to traditional Russian divination practices, which took place particularly around New Year's Eve, such as the attempt to see shapes in wax or the future in a mirror. The cockerel, too, could be a reference to such practices, or to the dawning of a new day and life - but the poem is constantly ringed round with uncertainty, like the women's attempts to see the future.

This poem made me think of a comment by poet and critic Ilya Kaminsky: "I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors." 'Tristia' is all about duality, which makes me it particularly appropriate for the end of one year and the beginning of another, a time when people naturally look both forwards and back. (January is named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces, who looks ahead and behind.) It reads like a palimpsest - past, present and future overlaid, the ancient Roman setting visible through the contemporary reality of 20th-century Russian political and personal upheaval. All of its times, settings and themes are both ghostly, and real. Science and superstition, women and men, literal and metaphorical death - all are present. "All happened long ago, all will happen again,/Only recognition of the moment is sweet", says Mandelstam. Paradoxically, in the fusion of prophecy and contemplation which comes naturally to poetry, such moments of pure being can emerge. 'Tristia' feels like a moment both peaceful and unsettling, in the eye of the storm.



TRISTIA (Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Mark L Mosher)


I have learned the science of parting
In bare-headed laments of night.
The oxen graze, the waiting goes on - 
The final hour of vigils in town,
And I honor the rituals of cockerel night,
When, bearing the weight of a journey endured,
Tear-stained eyes gazed into the void
And a woman's cry mixed with singing of the muse.

Who can know, with the word 'farewell',
What kind of separation awaits?
What promise for us in the cockerel's cry,
When fire in the acropolis burns,
And at the dawn of some new life,
When the ox chews lazily in its stall,
Why does the cockerel, herald of new life,
Beat its wings upon the city wall?

And I love the habits of weaving:
The shuttle twists, the spindle hums.
Look, like swan's down,
Barefooted Delia already runs forth!
O, meagre foundation of our life,
How pitiful the language of joy!
All happened long ago, all will happen again,
Only recognition of the moment is sweet.

Thus will it be: a transparent shape
On a clean porcelain plate,
And, like a squirrel's spread-out pelt,
A girl leans over the wax and gazes in.
The Greek Erebus is not for us to divine,
Wax is to woman what bronze is to man.
Our lot falls only in battle,
While for them divination is the death. 

Я изучил науку расставанья 

В простоволосых жалобах ночных. 

Жуют волы, и длится ожиданье — 

Последний час вигилий городских, 

И чту обряд той петушиной ночи, 

Когда, подняв дорожной скорби груз, 

Глядели вдаль заплаканные очи 

И женский плач мешался с пеньем муз. 

Кто может знать при слове «расставанье» 

Какая нам разлука предстоит, 

Что нам сулит петушье восклицанье, 

Когда огонь в акрополе горит, 

И на заре какой-то новой жизни, 

Когда в сенях лениво вол жуёт, 

Зачем петух, глашатай новой жизни, 

На городской стене крылами бьёт? 

И я люблю обыкновенье пряжи: 

Снуёт челнок, веретено жужжит. 

Смотри, навстречу, словно пух лебяжий, 

Уже босая Делия летит! 

О, нашей жизни скудная основа, 

Куда как беден радости язык! 

Всё было встарь, всё повторится снова, 

И сладок нам лишь узнаванья миг. 

Да будет так: прозрачная фигурка 

На чистом блюде глиняном лежит, 

Как беличья распластанная шкурка, 

Склонясь над воском, девушка глядит. 

Не нам гадать о греческом Эребе, 

Для женщин воск, что для мужчины медь. 

Нам только в битвах выпадает жребий, 

А им дано гадая умереть. 

1918

Mark L Mosher is a freelance translator. Beginning with Two Brothers, his translation of a play by Mikhail Lermontov (California State University, 1996), he has published translations from Russian, German, Spanish and Danish. His translation of excerpts from the memoirs of Mikhail Nesterov was published by Atlantis Magazine in 2004. He has participated as a translator in three exhibitions sponsored by the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation (Washington and Moscow, 1999-2009). His poem 'Doña Alba on the Ranch' recently appeared in 200 New Mexico Poems, an official project of the New Mexico Centennial Commission in cooperation with the University of New Mexico Press. He is currently working on an English translation of Johannes Vilhelm Jensen's Himmerland Stories. He lives in San Francisco, California and writes on topics literary, cultural and personal at www.nordicmountain.wordpress.com



Translation © Mark L Mosher, 2013.

Georg Trakl's 'Decline' and Earle Birney's 'David': "O My Brother We Climb..."

DECLINE (Georg Trakl - translation by Leif Hendrik)

(to Karl Borromaeus Heinrich)


Over the white pond
The wild birds have drawn away.
An icy wind sheers from our stars at evening.

Over our graves
The shattered brow of night inclines.
Under the oaks we rock in a silver skiff.

The white walls of the city resound continually.
Under arches of thorn
O my brother we climb, blind clock hands toward midnight.


UNTERGANG

(An Karl Borromaeus Heinrich)


Über den weissen Weiher
Sind die wilden Vögel fortgezogen.
Am Abend weht von unseren Sternen ein eisiger Wind.

Über unsere Gräber
Beugt sich die zerbrochene Stirne der Nacht.
Unter Eichen schaukeln wir auf einem silbernen Kahn.

Immer klingen die weissen Mauern der Stadt.
Unter Dornenbogen
O mein Bruder klimmen wir blinde Zeiger gen Mitternacht.


Translation from German © Leif Hendrik, 2012. Used by permission.


I'd like to thank Leif Hendrik for letting me use his translation, which also appears on his excellent Nordic Mountain blog, along with other translations and literary discussion. I have included Georg Trakl's original poem in German, for anyone who knows German, or who would like to try comparing.

I have only read a few of Georg Trakl's poems, so far, but the despair and darkness that radiates from them is palpable almost immediately. He was an Austrian poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clearly influenced by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and he lived haunted by mental illness and drug addiction. Traumatized by experiences in World War I, he died in Krakow of a drug overdose which may or may not have been deliberate.

I read 'Decline' and froze when I came to the last line: "O my brother we climb, blind clock hands toward midnight." The implied dialogue between the dead young men in this poem is almost unbearable. This is the terribly sad scenario which the sensitive imagine when they have left the gravesites of their loved ones.

I realised that the poem was making me think of the fate of some who pursue extreme mountaineering. Perhaps this was because I read it just a few days after the recent disaster on the Mont Blanc massif. Nine died in an avalanche on the notorious Mont Maudit, and shortly afterwards, two more climbers died after being stranded in bad weather. I have been deeply fascinated by extreme mountain climbing for years - apparently, a combination of having read James Ramsey Ullman's Banner In the Sky, a novel for children based on the first ascent of the Matterhorn, when I was young; and much later, reading Joe Simpson's gut-wrenching Touching the Void, and then moving on to his other books, including The Beckoning Silence, and works by other mountain writers. It's so far from what I've experienced personally, but the visceral nature of these books and the experiences they describe transports me completely outside of myself. It's the ultimate in living vicariously. You begin to understand the dangerous philosophy that these men (and sometimes women) pursue - of living so close to death that you feel more and more alive.

Images in 'Decline' must have made me think of climbing. The icy wind, the radiant stars; and "Over our graves/The shattered brow of night inclines" conjures up a stark image of the European mountains' great north faces leaning over their dead. "The white walls of the city resound continually": this could be an image of avalanche. And finally, the twin hands of the clock climbing towards zero hour; a climb, but a deathly one.

I think that this intense association which came at me out of the poem also had to do with the fact that I'd just read Earle Birney's famous Canadian poem 'David'. Here is a link to the poem, reproduced on the University of Toronto Libraries' website:


DAVID (Earle Birney)


In a sense, these poems couldn't be much more different. 'David' is lengthy, and specific, while Tralk's poem haunts and implies and stays just out of reach in a few lines. 'David' conjures up a sense of striving and freedom and love of nature and intense friendship between two young men, and then ends it in a shattering, devastating experience. The terrible climax of the poem (or the end of the climax, you might say) is the only thing not really spelled out, hinting at the extreme trauma suffered by the narrator. There are lines here which could almost echo Trakl, at least in their horrified intensity - if not 'Decline' specifically, then perhaps another poem:


[...] At last through the fanged

And blinding seracs I slid to the milky wrangling

Falls at the glacier's snout, through the rocks piled huge

On the humped moraine, and into the spectral larches,

Alone. By the glooming lake I sank and chilled

My mouth but I could not rest and stumbled still

To the valley, losing my way in the ragged marsh.

I was glad of the mire that covered the stains, on my ripped

Boots, of his blood, but panic was on me, the reek

Of the bog, the purple glimmer of toadstools obscene

In the twilight. [...]

I suppose that this entry is more about the connections that I make while reading poetry than about one poem or the other, in the end; but the train of thought seemed worth following, and I wondered again if the loss of life so often risked in these endeavours is worth it.

The photograph at the top of this entry was taken by me at the famous Eiger Window on the Eigerwand, the mountain's legendary north face. My brother and I took a train trip up to the Jungfrau a few years ago, and I lived one of my dreams, of seeing the Eiger and even setting foot on (in?) it. Looking out of that window was a sobering experience - it was like being in a low-flying airplane, and it's only about halfway up the face. It was unforgettable.