Russian poetry on the whole, and Mandelstam in particular, does not deserve to be treated as a poor relation. The language and its literature, especially its poetry, are the best things that that country has. Yet it is not concern for Mandelstam's or Russia's prestige that makes one shudder at what has been done to his lines in English: it is rather a sense of plundering the English-language culture, of degrading its own criteria, of dodging the spiritual challenge. "O.K.," a young American poet or reader of poetry may conclude after perusing these volumes, "the same thing goes on over there in Russia." But what goes on over there is not at all the same thing. Apart from her metaphors, Russian poetry has set an example of moral purity and firmness, which to no small degree has been reflected in the preservation of so-called classical forms without any damage to content. Herein lies her distinction from her Western sisters, though in no way docs one presume to judge whom this distinction favors most. However, it is a distinction, and if only for purely ethnographic reasons, that quality ought to be preserved in translation and not forced into some common mold.
A poem is the result of a certain necessity: it is inevitable, and so is its fonn. "Necessity," as the poet's widow Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her "Mozart and Salieri" (which is a must for everyone interested in the psychology of creativity), "is not a compulsion and is not the curse of determinism, but is a link between times, if the torch inherited from forebears has not been trampled." Necessities of course cannot be echoed; but a translator's disregard for forms which are illumined and hallowed by time is nothing but stamping out that torch. The only good thing about the theories put forth to justify this practice is that their authors get paid for stating their views in print.
As though it is aware of the fragility and treachery of man's faculties and senses, a poem aims at human memory. To that end, it employs a form which is essentially a mnemonic device allowing one's brain to retain a world—and simplifying the task of retaining it—when the rest of one's frame gives up. Memory usually is the last to go, as if it were trying to keep a record of the going itself. A poem thus may be the last thing to leave one's drooling lips. Nobody expects a native English speaker to mumble at that moment verses of a Russian poet. But if he mumbles something by Auden or Yeats or Frost he will be closer to Mandelstam's originals than current translators are.
In other words, the English-speaking world has yet to hear this nervous, high-pitched, pure voice shot through with love, terror, memory, culture, faith—a voice trembling, perhaps, like a match burning in a high wind, yet utterly inextinguishable. The voice that stays behind when its owner is gone. He was, one is tempted to say, a modem Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.
1977
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary
Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. In educated circles, especially among the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identity. This is especially so in Russia, where in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union.
"Nadya is the most fortunate widow," Anna Akhmatova used to say, having in mind the universal recognition coming to Osip Mandelstam at about that time. The focus of this remark was, understandably, her fellow poet, and right though she was, this was the view from the outside. By the time this recognition began to arrive, Mme Mandelstam was already in her sixties, her health extremely precarious and her means meager. Besides, for all the universality of that recognition, it did not include the fabled "one-sixth of the entire planet," i.e., Russia itself. Behind her were already two decades of widowhood, utter deprivation, the Great (obliterating any personal loss) War, and the daily fear of being grabbed by the agents of State Security as a wife of an enemy of the people. Short of death, anything that followed could mean only respite.
I met her for the first time precisely then, in the winter of 196:2, in the city of Pskov, where together with a couple of friends I went to take a look at the local churches (the finest, in my view, in the empire). Having learned about our intentions to travel to that city, Anna Akhmatova suggested we \ isit Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was teaching English at the local pedagogical institute, and gave us several books for her. That was the first time I heard her name: I didn't know that she existed.
She was living in a small communal apartment consisting of two rooms. The first room was occupied by a woman whose name, ironically enough, was Nyetsvetaeva (literally: Xon-Tsvetaeva), the second was Mme Mandelstam's. It was eight square meters large, the size of an average American bathroom. Most of the space was taken up by a cast-iron twin-sized bed; there were also two wicker chairs, a wardrobe chest with a small mirror, and an aU-purpose bedside table, on which sat plates with the leftovers of her supper and, next to the plates, an open paperback copy of The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The presence of this red-covered book in this tiny cell, and the fact that she didn't hide it under the pillow at the sound of the doorbell, meant precisely this: the beginning of respite.
The book, as it turned out, was sent to her by Akhmatova, who for nearly half the century remained the closest friend of the Mandelstams: first of both of them, later of Nadezhda alone. Twice a widow herself (her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 by the Cheka—the maiden name of the KGB; the second, the art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a concentration camp belonging to the same establishment), Akhmatova helped Nadezhda Mandelstam in every way possible, and during the war years literally saved her life by smuggling Nadezhda into Tashkent, where some of the writers had been evacuated, and by sharing with her the daily rations. Even with her two husbands killed by the regime, with her son languishing in the camps for eighteen years, Akhmatova was somewhat better off than Nadezhda Mandelstam, if only because she was recognized, however reluctantly, as a writer, and was allowed to live in Leningrad and Moscow. For the wife of an enemy of the people big cities were simply off limits.
For decades this woman was on the run, darting through the back waters and provincial to^s of the big empire, settling down in a new place only to take off at the first sign of danger. The status of nonperson gradually became her second nature. She was a small woman, of slim build, and with the passage of years she shriveled more and more, as though trying to herself into something weightless, something easily pocketed in the moment of flight. Similarly, she had virtually no possessions: no furniture, no art objects, no library. The books, even foreign books, never stayed in her hands for long: after being read or glanced through they would be passed on to someone else—the way it ought to be with books. In the years of her utmost affluence, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, the most expensive item in her one-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall.
A thief would be disillusioned here; so would those with a search warrant.
In those "affiuent" years following the publication in the West of her two volumes of memoirs^ that kitchen became the place of veritable pilgrimages. Nearly every other night the best of what survived or came to life in the post-Stalin era in Russia gathered around the long wooden table, which was ten times bigger than the bedstead in Pskov. It almost seemed that she was about to make up for decades of being a pariah. I doubt, though, that she did, and somehow I remember her better in that small room in Pskov, or sitting on the edge of a couch in Akhmatova's apartment in Leningrad, where she would come from time to time illegally from Pskov, or emerging from the depth of the corridor in Shklov- sky's apartment in Moscow, where she perched before she got a place of her own. Perhaps I remember that more clearly because there she was more in her element as an outcast, a fugitive, "the beggar-friend," as Osip Mandelstam calls her in one of his poems, and that is what she remained for the rest of her life.