The smile of an elderly Armenian peasant woman is inexplicably fine—there is so much nobility in it, exhausted dignity, and a kind of solemn, married charm.
The horses walk among divans, step on the pillows, wear out the shafts. You ride along feeling you have an invitation from Tamerlane in your pocket.
I saw the tomb of a giant Kurd of fabulous dimensions and accepted it as normal.
The lead horse minted rubles with her hoofs and her prodigality knew no bounds.
From the pommel of my saddle dangled an unplucked chicken, killed that morning in Biurakan.
Once in a while my horse would bend down to the grass, and its neck expressed its allegiance to the Standpats, a people older than the Romans.
A milky quietude ensued. The whey of silence curdled. The curds of the bells and the cranberries of the harness bells of various calibers muttered and clashed. Near every wellyard the karakul committee proceeded with its meeting. It seemed as if dozens of small circus owners had pitched their tents and show booths on the louse-bitten hill and, unprepared for the full house, taken unawares, swarmed about in their camps, clattering their dairy dishes, cramming the lambs into their lair, and rushing to lock up for their night in oxrealm the world-weary, steaming damp heads of cattle, distributing them among their stalls in Bay City.
Armenian and Kurdish camps do not differ in their arrangements. They are cattle-breeders’ settlements on the terraces of Alagez, stopovers for villas, laid out in carefully chosen places.
Stone markers indicate the floor plan of the tent and the small adjoining yard with its heaped wall of dung. Abandoned or unoccupied camps look as if they had been burnt out.
The guides from Biurakan were glad to stop overnight in Kamarlu: they had relatives there.
A childless old couple received us for the night into the bosom of their tent.
The old woman moved and worked with weepy, withdrawing, blessing motions as she prepared a smoky supper and some felt strips for bedding.
“Here, take the felt! Grab a blanket . . . Tell us something about Moscow.”
Our hosts got ready for bed. An oil wick lit up the tent, making it seem high as a railroad station. The wife took out a coarse army nightshirt and put it on her husband.
I felt as shy as if I were in a palace.
1. The body of Arshak19 is unwashed and his beard has run wild.
2. The king’s fingernails are broken, and the wood lice crawl over his face.
3. His ears have grown dull with silence, but once they listened to Greek music.
4. His tongue is scabby from jailers’ food, but there was a time when it pressed grapes against the roof of his mouth and was adroit as the tip of a flutist’s tongue.
5. The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is as sparse as the bleating of a sheep.
6. King Shapukh20—thinks Arshak—has got the better of me, and, worse than that, he has taken my air21 for himself.
7. The Assyrian grips my heart.
8. He is the commander of my hair and my fingernails. He grows me my beard and swallows me my spit, so accustomed has he grown to the thought that I am here, in the fortress of Aniush.
9. The Kushan people rebelled against Shapukh.
10. They broke through the border at an undefended place, as through a silken cord.
11. The Kushan attack pricked and disturbed King Shapukh, like an eyelash in his eye.
12. Both the sides (enemies) squinted, so as not to see each other.
13. A certain Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, was in the center of Shapukh’s army, encouraged the commander of the cavalry, wormed his way into his master’s favor, snatched him, like a chessman, out of danger, and all the while remained in full view.
14. He was governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak, in his velvet voice, used to give orders.
15. Yesterday he was king but today he has fallen into a fissure, has scrunched himself into a belly like a baby, and he warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.
16. When the time came for his reward Darmastat inserted into the Assyrian’s ears a request that tickled like a feather:
17. Give me a pass to Aniush Fortress. I would like Arshak to spend one additional day, full of hearing, taste, and smell, as it was before, when he amused himself at the hunt or busied himself with the planting of trees.
Sleep is easy in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out, recalls the length of the road. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures, walls you in. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge.
Notes
Introduction: Friends and Enemies of the Word
1. “The Word and Culture.”
The reader without Russian wishing to learn something about Mandelstam will find the following works indispensible: Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; this is the first volume of what promises to be a two-volume critical biography of Mandelstam; it contains a number of sensitive translations and exegeses of his poems—it was Brown’s intention that his book serve as an anthology as well—and some of the critical essays; unfortunately, it stops as of 1928); Brown’s edition of The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; contains Mandelstam’s only “novella” and his fictionalized autobiographical works); Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970) and Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974) (Mandelstam’s widow’s two books of memoirs, still the most authoritative source on his life and attitudes to life and poetry); and her single venture into interpretive criticism, Mozart and Salieri, trans. R. A. McLean (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1973; the title is from a short play by Pushkin, on which Mandelstam himself had commented); the two volumes that I edited, with introductions and notes, published in the series Russian Literature in Translation by the State University of New York Press: Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1972), and Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1973; contains, in addition to a long interpretive essay that is the companion of the present one, two chapters from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs that did not appear in the English translation cited above); a recent issue of Soviet Studies in Literature, 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973), which includes Soviet writing on Mandelstam, ranging from the “apologetic” introduction by Alexander Dymshits to the truncated Soviet edition of Mandelstam’s poems, to the perceptive and subtle essay by Lidia Ginzburg; Arthur A. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: an Essay in Antiphon (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1974), which takes up the complex question of Mandelstam’s Jewishness and its relation to his Christianity.
2. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Library Associates, 1967–1971) (henceforth cited as Mandel’shtam), 2: 484. See also Brown, Mandelstam, p. 35.
3. Brown, ed., The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, p. 111.
4. See the essays “The Morning of Acmeism” and “About the Nature of the Word.”
5. Osip Mandel’shtam, Stikhotvoreniia [Poems] (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1973); see the English translation of the introduction by Alexander Dymshits, “I Enter the World . . . ,” Soviet Studies in Literature 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973).
6. The translation in this volume first appeared as “Talking about Dante,” Delos, no. 6 (1971): 65–107. In connection with this essay, the commentary by Mandelstam’s Italian translator, A. Ripellino, “Note sulla prosa di Mandel’stam,” in La Quarta Prosa (Bari, 1967), p. 10, is of considerable interest.