I noticed that in his work on a poem there were two points at which he would sigh with relief—when the first words in a line or stanza came to him, and when the last of the foreign bodies was driven out by the right word. Only then is there an end to the process of listening in to oneself—the same process that can prepare the way for a disturbance of the inner hearing and loss of sanity. The poem now seems to fall away from the author and no longer torments him with its resonance. He is released from the thing that obsesses him. Io, the poor cow, escapes from the gadfly.
If the poem won't "go away," M. said, it means that there is something wrong with it, or something "still hidden in it"—a last fruitful bud from which a new shoot might sprout. In other words, the work is not finished. Whenever M.'s "inner voice" ceased, he was always very eager to read the new poem to someone. I wasn't enough for this: I witnessed his throes at such close quarters that M. always thought I must also be able to hear the "hum." He even reproached me sometimes for not having caught part of it. In his last Voronezh period (when he wrote the verse in his Second and Third Notebooks) we went round to Natasha Shtempel, or invited Fedia Marants, an agronomist of the utmost charm and integrity who in his youth had studied to be a violinist but had had to give it up when he damaged his hand in an accident. Fedia had some of the inner harmony which comes to people who listen to music, and though this was his first encounter with poetry, his musical sense made him a better judge than many a specialist would have been.
The first reading rounds off, as it were, the process of working on a poem, and the first listener is felt to be a contributor to it. From 1930 M.'s "first listeners" were Boris Sergeyevich Kuzin, a biologist, to whom M. dedicated his poem "To the German Language," and Alexander Margulis—it was he who circulated the poems of the first two Notebooks. Memorizing them as he listened, or getting copies of them, he read them to his innumerable friends and acquaintances. M. wrote an endless number of "margulets," as he called the couplets about him which had to begin with the words "Old man Margulis . . ." and be submitted for his approval. M. used to say that the poverty-sticken "old man Margulis" (he was no more than thirty at the time) kept an even poorer old man in his apartment and secretly supported him. Margulis was a real "one-man orchestra" who could whistle even the most difficult symphonies. It is a pity- that the best "margulets," those about how the "old man" performed Beethoven in the streets of Moscow, have been lost. Margulis married the beautiful Iza Khantsyn, famous for her performances of Scriabin. Most of all in life he loved music, poetry and tales of adventure. I have been told that when he was dying in a camp in eastern Siberia he told yarns and adventure stories to the common criminals, who gave him food in return.
M.'s first listener was often Lev Gumilev, who lived with us in the winter of 1933-34. The beginning of the first Voronezh Notebook was read to Rudakov, who was exiled to Voronezh together with other ex-members of the aristocracy from Leningrad, but soon was allowed to return to the city.
It so happens that all of M.'s "first listeners" came to a tragic end. Apart from Natasha, they all went through prison and exile. Fedia Marants, for instance, was in prison for two years during the Yezhov terror, but he stuck it out without signing any confession and was therefore one of the people fortunate enough to be released after Yezhov's fall. Ill and broken after this ordeal, he was again arrested and exiled during the war merely because he happened to have been born in Vienna, from where he had been brought home to Kiev at the age of three weeks.
It might seem logical to conclude that if all M.'s "first listeners" suffered persecution, there must have been a link between their cases. But in fact there was no such link. Even before we met him, Kuzin had been "hauled in" for questioning, in connection withsome affair involving biologists. He actually first got in trouble for some humorous verse he always carefully avoided showing us. He was summoned to various private apartments with rooms specially reserved for a secret police official whose job was to recruit informers. He was arrested for the first time in 1932, and then again for a second time together with his fellow biologist Vermel—both of them were regarded as neo-Lamarckists and had already been expelled from the Timiriazev Academy. The biologist Kuzin, the agronomist Fedia Marants, the son of an executed general Rudakov, and the son of an executed poet Gumilev did not even know each other. The only thing they all had in common was their love of poetry. Evidently this went with qualities of the mind which in our country doomed people to death or, at the best, to exile. Only translators were exempt.
The process of doing a translation is the exact opposite of work on original verse. I am not speaking here, of course, of the miraculous meeting of poetic minds that one finds in Zhukovski, whose translations brought a new element into Russian poetry, or of other translated verse that has become a valid part of Russian literature—such as A. K. Tolstoi's rendering of Goethe's "Bride of Corinth," which we liked so much. Only real poets can achieve this kind of thing— and then very rarely. But an ordinary translation is a cold and calculated act of versification in which certain aspects of the writing of poetry are imitated. Strange to say, in translation there is no preexisting entity waiting to be expressed. The translator sets himself in motion like an engine and then grinds out the required melody by a laborious mechanical process. He is deficient in what Khodasevich so aptly called "secret hearing." A real poet should beware of translation—it may only prevent the birth of original poetry.
In his "Conversation About Dante" M. speaks of "translators of ready-made meaning" to express his attitude toward translation and those who use poetic forms as a medium of ideas. M. always distinguished between this and real poetry. There was a time when people in this country stopped reading poetry altogether. "The thing about poetry," said Akhmatova, "is that once somebody swallows a substitute he will feel poisoned forever after." Poetry is now in fashion again and people are reading it as never before—but only because they have learned to tell the difference between it and all the glib products of "translators."
hat happened to M. in the Lubianka during his interroga
A poem is like a word. A consciously made-up word lacks all vitality. This is shown by the failure of all the attempts to create one's own vocabulary—these idiosyncratic games with man's divine gift of speech. When you attach an arbitrary meaning to the phonetic unit known as a word, the result is jargon, or the kind of verbal chaff used for selfish purposes by high priests, soothsayers, heads of state and other charlatans. Both words and poetry are desecrated in this way and made to perform the function of a hypnotist's crystal. Sooner or later the deception will be shown up for what it is, but people are always in danger of falling for every new impostor who turns his crystal in a different direction.