TRISTIA
I've mastered the great craft of separation amidst the bare unbraided pleas of night, those Ungerings while oxen chew their ration, the watchful town's last eyelid's shutting tight. And I revere that midnight rooster's descant when shmildering the wayfarer's sack of wrong eyes stained with tears were peering at the distance and women's wailings were the Mwes' song.
Who is to tell when hearing "separation" what kind of parting this may resonate, foreshadowed by a rooster's exclamation as candles twist the temple's colonnade; why at the dawn of some new life, new era when oxen chew their ration in the stall that wakeful rooster, a new life's towncrier, flaps its tom wings atop the city wall.
And I adore the worsted yarn's behavior:
the shuttle bustles and the spindle hums;
look how young Delia, barefooted, braver
than down of swans, glides straight into your arms!
Oh, our life's lamentable coarse fabric,
how poor the language of our ;oy indeed.
What happened once, becomes a worn-out matrix.
Yet, recognition is intensely sweet!
So be it thus: a small translucent figure spreads like a squirrel pelt across a clean clay plate; a girl bends over it, her eager gaze scrutinizes what the wax may mean. To ponder Erebus, that's not for our acumen. To women, wax is as to men steel's shine. Our lot is drawn only in war; to women it's given to meet death while they divine.
(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)
Later, in the thirties, during what is lmown as the Voronezh period, when all those themes—including Rome and Christianity—yielded to the "theme" of bare existential horror and a terrifying spiritual acceleration, the pattern of interplay, of interdependence between those realms, becomes even more obvious and dense.
It is not that Mandelstam was a "civilized" poet; he was rather a poet for and of civilization. Once, on being asked to define Acmeism—the literary movement to which he belonged—he answered: "nostalgia for a world culture." This notion of a world culture is distinctly Russian. Because of its location (neither East nor West) and its imperfect history, Russia has always suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority, at least toward the West. Out of this inferiority grew the ideal of a certain cultural unity "out there" and a subsequent intellectual voracity toward anything coming from that direction. This is, in a way, a Russian version of Hellenicism, and Mandelstam's remark about Pushkin's "Hellenistic paleness" was not an idle one.
The mediastinum of this Russian Hellenicism was St. Petersburg. Perhaps the best emblem for Mandelstam's attitude toward this so-called world culture could be that strictly classical portico of the St. Petersburg Admiralty decorated with reliefs of trumpeting angels and topped with a golden spire bearing a silhouette of a clipper at its tip. In order to understand his poetry better, the English- speaking reader perhaps ought to realize that Mandelstam was a Jew who was living in the capital of Imperial Russia, whose dominant religion was Orthodoxy, whose political structure was inherently Byzantine, and whose alphabet had been devised by two Greek monks. Historically speaking, this organic blend was most strongly felt in Petersburg, which became Mandelstam's "familiar as tears" eschato- logical niche for the rest of his not-that-long life.
It was long enough, however, to immortalize this place, and if his poetry was sometimes called "Petersburgian," there is more than one reason to consider this definition both accurate and complimentary. Accurate because, apart from being the administrative capital of the empire, Petersburg was also the spiritual center of it, and in the beginning of the century the strands of that current were merging there the way they do in Mandelstam's poems. Complimentary because both the poet and the city profited in meaning by their confrontation. If the West was Athens, Petersburg in the teens of this century was Alexandria. This "window on Europe," as Petersburg was called by some gentle souls of the Enlightenment, this "most invented city," as it was defined later by Dostoevsky, lying at the latitude of Vancouver, in the mouth of a river as wide as the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey, was and is beautiful with that kind of beauty which happens to be caused by madness—or which tries to conceal this madness. Classicism never had so much room, and the Italian architects who kept being invited by successive Russian monarchs understood this all too well. The giant, infinite, vertical rafts of white columns from the fagades of the embankments' palaces belonging to the Czar, his family, the aristocracy, embassies, and the nouoeaux riches are carried by the reflecting river down to the Baltic. On the main avenue of the empire—Nevsky Prospect—there are churches of all creeds. The endless, wide streets are filled with cabriolets, newly introduced automobiles, idle, well-dressed crowds, first-class boutiques, confectioneries, etc. Immensely wide squares with mounted statues of previous rulers and triumphal columns taller than Nelson's. Lots of publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, political parties (more than in contemporary America), theaters, restaurants, gypsies. All this is surrounded by the brick Birnam
Wood of the factories' smoking chimneys and covered by the damp, gray, widespread blanket of the Northern Hemisphere's sky. One war is lost, another—a world war—is impending, and you are a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pentameters.
In this giant-scale embodiment of perfect order, iambic beat is as natural as cobblestones. Petersburg is a cradle of Russian poetry and, what is more, of its prosody. The idea of a noble structure, regardless of the quality of the content (sometimes precisely against its quality, which creates a terrific sense of disparity—indicating not so much the author's but the verse's own evaluation of the described phenomenon), is utterly local. The whole thing started a century ago, and Mandelstam's usage of strict meters in his first hook, Stone, is clearly reminiscent of Pushkin, and of his pleiad. And yet, again, it is not a result of some conscious choice, nor is it a sign of Mandelstam's style being predetermined by the preceding or contemporary processes in Russian poetry.
The presence of an echo is the primal trait of any good acoustics, and Mandelstam merely made a great cupola for his predecessors. The most distinct voices underneath it belong to Derzhavin, Baratynsky, and Batyushkov. To a great extent, however, he was acting very much on his own in spite of any existing idiom—especially the contemporary one. He simply had too much to say to worry about his stylistic uniqueness. But this overloaded quality of his otherwise regular verse was what made him unique.
Ostensibly, his poems did not look so different from the work of the Symbolists, who were dominating the literary scene: he was using fairly regular rhymes, a standard stan- zaic design, and the length of his poems was quite ordinary —from sixteen to twenty-four lines. But by using these humble means of transportation he was taking his reader much farther than any of those cozy-because-vague meta- physicists who called themselves Russian Symbolists. As a movement, Symbolism was surely the last great one (and not only in Russia); yet poetry is an extremely individualistic art, it resents isms. The poetic production of Symbolism was as voluminous and seraphic as the enrollment and postulates of this movement were. This soaring upward was so groundless that graduate students, military cadets, and clerks felt tempted, and by the tum of the century the genre was compromised to the point of verbal inflation, somewhat like the situation with free verse in America today. Then, surely, devaluation as reaction came, bearing the names of Futurism, Constructivism, Imagism, and so forth. Still, these were isms fighting isms, devices fighting devices. Only two poets, Mandelstarn and Tsvetaeva, came up with a qualitatively new content, and their fate reflected in its dreadful way the degree of their spiritual autonomy.