“Qual soleano i campion far nudi ed unti,
avvisando lor presa e lor vantaggio,
prima che sien tra lor battuti e punti.”
I would translate: “As stripped and oiled wrestlers used to do, looking for a grip and an advantage before they started hitting out at each other.”
2. For a strikingly similar account of lyrical composition, see Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 275–277.
3. Dadaism was the modernist movement in the arts, originating in Switzerland during the years of the First World War, whose founders were Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters. The name suggests children’s word-formation, baby talk.
4. “And soothingly would speak the language
that used to delight fathers and mothers:
. . . . . . . . . . .
would tell her family tales
about the Trojans and Fiesole and Rome.”
5. In Russian, zaum. Translated elsewhere in this volume as “metalogic.” Zaumnyi means “metalogical.” The reference is to Khlebnikov and the Futurists and their experiments with “transsense” or “metalogical” language. See Dante, Purgatorio, XI, 103–108.
6. The Italian reads:
“Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro
che corrono a Verona il drappo verde
per la campagna; e parve di costoro
quegli che vince e non colui che perde.”
Mandelstam seems to have made a slight mistake in the translation, which should read: “Then he turned back, and seemed like one of those who run through the open field at Verona for [the prize of] the green cloth; and of them he seemed like him who wins, not like him who loses.”
7. “Averroës, who composed the great commentary.”
8. “Turn around: what are you doing?”
9. “Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto;
ed el s’ergea col petto e colla fronte,
com’ avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.”
10. “‘And if,’ continuing what he had said before,
‘they have learnt that art badly,’ he said,
‘it torments me more than this bed.’”
11. “O Tosco, che per la città del foco
vivo ten vai così parlando onesto,
piacciati di ristare in questo loco.
La tua loquela ti fa manifesto
di quella nobil patria natio,
alla qual forse fui troppo molesto.”
(Inferno, X, 22–27)
12. Raznochinets (razno-, “various”; chin, “rank”): in the nineteenth century, a member of the intelligentsia who was not of noble origin. He could be the son of a priest or a merchant who did not follow in his father’s footsteps, or someone of even lower social origin, who had managed to acquire an education. The term might also be used ironically in connection with the declassing of the old Russian nobility into a service class, a class in which status was more and more determined by rank in the civil service. Thus, a raznochinets is not necessarily a “commoner” by origin, but he might well be. In the Russian literary tradition, the pathos of the “noble raznochinets” is exemplified in the character of Evgeny in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” a poor clerk whose ancestors were prominent nobility. In the 1860’s, however, “the decade of the raznochintsy,” as it was commonly called, these were men of different but humble class origins (sons of priests, merchants, etc.) who received a higher education and qualified for medium civil-service rank for the first time—i.e., “the newly educated,” but also those of lowly or obscure origins hobnobbing for the first time with their social and economic superiors by virtue of their education. Mandelstam identified himself, as well as Dante, as a raznochinets. He was not well acquainted with the social history of Florence, but poetic instinct suggested Dante’s social awkwardness—in this instance, I suspect, mistakenly.
13. A reference to Pushkin’s very complex relationship to the Emperor Nicholas I and the St. Petersburg court. Pushkin was very proud of his ancestry, of what he called his “six hundred years of nobility,” although painfully aware that it counted for little in the St. Petersburg of the 1830’s. He often contrasted the position of powerful parvenus with his own. At the same time, he referred to himself as a meshchanin (that is, a bourgeois, but of a special kind; an artisan who peddles his own wares on the market)—in part ironically and in a derogatory sense, in response to a parvenu’s slur on his ancestry; yet in part proudly, as someone who made his own way, who was someone in his own right, without reference to ancestors. At the same time, Pushkin was appalled at the low level of literary taste, the contempt in which Russian letters were held by snobs who preferred French, and in general the difficulty of being a poet in Russia. These feelings were exacerbated by the fact that the emperor be stowed on Pushkin the dubious honor of making him a Kammerjunker—an honorary court position that required attendance in uniform. It was, however, an honor normally bestowed on youths in their teens, and Pushkin was in his thirties; there was also some suspicion that either the emperor himself or persons close to him had designs on Pushkin’s wife. For a number of reasons connected with the institution of autocracy and the personality of Nicholas I, as well as for reasons of economic dependence, it was impossible for Pushkin to refuse the position, in which he writhed miserably during his last years, and which contributed much to the final impasse of his life, a fatal duel.
14. “As though insulting Hell with his immense disdain.” (See note 9 above.)
15. “Their eyes, which were only moist inwardly before,
overflowed down to the lips . . .”
Mandelstam follows those commentators who interpret le labbra, “the lips,” as referring to the eyelids, hence “the labial eye.” But see Singleton’s commentary (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 1 [pt.2]: 588).
16. “I was already in a place where the resounding
of the water that fell into the next circle
could be heard like the hum beehives make.”
17. Obviously those of Gustave Doré.
18. From Blok’s poem “Ravenna.”
19. “Two paws he had, hairy to the armpits;
his back and his chest and both his sides
were painted with knots and rings:
With more color, groundwork, and patterning
than ever Tatars or Turks made cloth;
nor did Arachne ever weave such webs on her loom.”
20. “Cimabue believed that in painting.”
21. “Thus I cried with face uplifted.”
22. The Italian text reads:
Quante ’l villan ch’al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che ’l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov’ e’ vendemmia e ara:
di tante fiamme tutta risplendea
l’ottava bolgia, sì com’ io m’accorsi
tosto che fui là ‘ve ’l fondo parea.
E qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi
vide ’l carro d’Elia al dipartire,
quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,
che nol potea sì con li occhi seguire,
ch’el vedesse altro che la fiamma sola,
sì come nuvoletta, in sù salire:
tal si move ciascuna per la gola
del fosso, ché nessuna mostra ’l furto,
e ogne fiamma un peccatore invola.”
A more literal translation would read:
As many as the fireflies the peasant sees, taking his rest on the hill—
in the season when he who lights the world
least hides his face from us,