. . . And stiff swallows of round eyebrows(a) flew (b)from the grave to me to tell me they've rested enough in their (a) cold Stockholm bed (b).
Imagine a four-foot amphibrach with alternating (a b a b) rhyme.
This strophe is an apotheosis of restructuring time. For one thing, language is itself a product of the past. The retum of these stiff swallows implies both the recurrent character of their presence and of the simile itself, either as an intimate thought or as a spoken phrase. Also, "flew ... to me" suggests spring, returning seasons. "To tell me they've rested enough," too, suggests past: past imperfect because not attended. And then the last line makes a full circle because the adjective "Stockholm" exposes the hidden allusion to Hans Christian Andersen's children's story about the wounded swallow wintering in the mole's hole, then recovering and flying home. Every schoolboy in Russia knows this story. The conscious process of remembering turns out to be strongly rooted in the subconscious memory and creates a sensation of sorrow so piercing, it's as if this is not a suffering man we hear but the very voice of his wounded psyche. This kind of voice surely clashes with everything, even with its medium's—i.e., poet's—life. It is like Odysseus tying himself to a mast against the call of his soul; this—and not only the fact that Mandelstam is married—is why he is so elliptical here.
He worked in Russian poetry for thirty years, and what he did will last as long as the Russian language exists. It will certainly outlast the present and any subsequent regime in that country, because of both its lyricism and its profundity. Quite frankly, I don't know anything in the poetry of the world comparable to the revelatory quality of these four lines from his "Verses on the Unknown Soldier," written just a year prior to his death:
An Arabian messmul a muddle, The light of speeds honed into a beam— And with its slanted soles, A ray balances on my retina...
There is almost no grammar here but it is not a modernistic device, it is a result of an incredible psychic acceleration, which at other times was responsible for the breakthroughs of Job and Jeremiah. This honing of speeds is as much a self-portrait as an incredible insight into astrophysics. What he heard at his back "hurrying near" wasn't any "winged chariot" but his "wolf-hound century," and he ran till there was space. When space ended, he hit time.
Which is to say, us. This pronoun stands not only for his Russian- but also for his English-speaking readers. Perhaps more than anyone in this century, he was a poet of civilization: he contributed to what had inspired him. One may even argue that he became a part of it long before he met death. Of course he was a Russian, but not any more so than Giotto was an Italian. Civilization is the sum total of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle—speaking both metaphorically and literally—is translation. The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation.
His life, as well as his death, was a result of this civilization. With a poet, one's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperament, is determined and shaped by one's aesthetics. This is what accounts for poets finding themselves invariably at odds with the social reality, and their death rate indicates the distance which that reality puts between itself and civilization. So does the quality of translation.
A child of a civilization based on the principles of order and sacrifice, Mandelstam incarnated both; and it is only fair to expect from his translators at least a semblance of parity. The rigors involved in producing an echo, formidable though they may seem, are in themselves an homage to that nostalgia for the world culture which drove and fashioned the original. The formal aspects of Mandelstam's verse are not the product of some backward poetics but, in effect, columns of the aforesaid portico. To remove them is not only to reduce one's own "architecture" to heaps of rubble and shacks: it is to lie about what the poet has lived and died for.
Translation is a search for an equivalent, not for a substitute. It requires stylistic, if not psychological, congeniality. For instance, the stylistic idiom that could be used in translating Mandelstam is that of the late Yeats (with whom he has much in common thematically as well). The trouble of course is that a person who can master such an idiom— if such a person exists—will no doubt prefer to write his own verse anyway and not rack his brains over translation (which doesn't pay that well besides). But apart from technical skills and even psychological congeniality, the most crucial thing that a translator of Mandelstam should possess or else develop is a like-minded sentiment for civilization.
Mandelstam is a formal poet in the highest sense of the word. For him, a poem begins with a sound, with "a soporous molded shape of form," as he himself called it. The absence of this notion reduces even the most accurate rendition of his imagery to a stimulating read. "I alone in
Russia work from the voice, while all round the unmitigated muck scribbles," says Mandelstam of himself in his "Fourth Prose." This is said with the fury and dignity of a poet who realized that the source of his creativity conditioned its method.
It would be futile and unreasonable to expect a translator to follow suit: the voice one works from and by is bound to be unique. Yet the timbre, pitch, and pace reflected in the verse's meter are approachable. It should be remembered that verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free verse. Differences in meters are differences in breath and in heartbeat. Differences in rhyming pattern are those of brain functions. The cavalier treatment of either is at best a sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a murder. In any case, it is a crime of the mind, for which its perpetrator—especially if he is not caught—pays with the pace of his intellectual degradation. As for the readers, they buy a lie.
Yet the rigors involved in producing a decent echo are too high. They excessively shackle individuality. Calls for the use of an "instrument of poetry in our own time" are too strident. And translators rush to find substitutes. This happens primarily because such translators are themselves usually poets, and their own individuality is dearest of all to them. Their conception of individuality simply precludes the possibility of sacrifice, which is the primary feature of mature individuality (and also the primary requirement of any—even a technical—translation). The net result is that a poem of Mandelstam's, both visually and in its texture, resembles some witless Neruda piece or one from Urdu or Swahili. If it survives, this is due to the oddity of its imagery, or of its intensity, acquiring in the eyes of the reader a certain ethnographic significance. "I don't see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet," said the late W. H. Auden. "The translations that I've seen don't convince me of it."
Small wonder. In the available versions, one encounters an absolutely impersonal product, a sort of common denominator of modern verbal art. If they were simply bad translations, that wouldn't be so bad. For bad translations, precisely because of their badness, stimulate the reader's imagination and provoke a desire to break through or abstract oneself from the text: they spur one's intuition. In the cases at hand this possibility is practically ruled out: these versions bear the imprint of self-assured, insufferable stylistic provincialism; and the only optimistic remark one can make regarding them is that such low-quality art is an unquestionable sign of a culture extremely distant from decadence.