Wasn’t this because I found myself among people, renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of the zodiac or of a rose inscribed in stone?38
Mandelstam’s farewell journey—the longer ones he was to make were not of his own choosing—reinvigorated him and renewed his gift. “Parting,” he wrote, “is the younger sister of death,” and his departure from Armenia, “the younger sister of Judea,” was a preparation for death.39 The apocalyptic theme is unmistakable. Yet Mandelstam’s apocalypse is also an apokothastasis: he looks forward not only to the end, but also to resurrection and renewal. Amidst the crumbling of walls and exhaustion of phonetic ores, he counts on “the complicity of those united in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing.”40
A world come to an end; the world goes on.
Note
Note: A previous version of this introductory essay appeared in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 17: 357–373 and was reprinted, with a few changes, in Arion 2, no. 4 (1976).
* Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1973 State University of New York.
Conversation about Dante
Translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes
Così gridai colla faccia levata.
(Inferno, XVI, 76)
I.
Poetic speech is a crossbred process, and it consists of two sonorities. The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second sonority is the speech proper, that is, the intonational and phonetic work performed by the said instruments.
Understood thus, poetry is not a part of nature, not even the best or choicest part. Still less is it a reflection of nature, which would lead to a mockery of the law of identity; but it is something that, with astonishing independence, settles down in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating nature as acting it out by means of its instruments, which are commonly called images.
It is only very conditionally possible to speak of poetic speech or thought as sonorous, for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, and of these one, taken by itself, is absolutely mute, while the other, taken apart from its instrumental metamorphosis, is devoid of all significance and all interest and is subject to paraphrase, which is in my opinion the truest sign of the absence of poetry. For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.
Dante is a master of the instruments of poetry and not a manufacturer of images. He is a strategist of transformations and cross-breedings, and least of all is he a poet in the “All-European” and outwardly cultural sense of this word.
The wrestlers winding themselves into a tangle in the arena may be regarded as an example of a transformation of instruments and a harmony.
These naked and glistening wrestlers who walk about pluming themselves on their physical prowess before grappling in the decisive fight. . . .1
The modern cinema, meanwhile, with its metamorphosis of the tapeworm, turns into a malicious parody on the function of instruments in poetic speech, since its frames move without any conflict and merely succeed one another.
Imagine something understood, grasped, torn out of obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately upon the completion of the act of understanding and execution.
In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. Semantic satisfaction is equivalent to the feeling of having carried out a command.
The wave signals of meaning disappear once they have done their work: the more powerful they are, the more yielding, and the less prone to linger.
Otherwise one cannot escape the rote drilling, the hammering in of those prepared nails called “cultural-poetic” images.
External, explanatory imagery is incompatible with the presence of instruments.
The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.2
Poetic speech is a carpet fabric with a multitude of textile warps which differ one from the other only in the coloring of the performance, only in the musical score of the constantly changing directives of the instrumental code of signals.
It is a most durable carpet, woven out of water: a carpet in which the currents of the Ganges (taken as a textile theme) do not mix with the samples of the Nile and the Euphrates, but remain many-hued, in braids, figures, and ornaments—but not in regular patterns, for a pattern is that very paraphrase of which we were speaking. Ornament is good by virtue of the fact that it preserves the traces of its origin as a performed piece of nature—animal, vegetable, steppe, Scythian, Egyptian, what you will, national or barbarian, it is always speaking, seeing, active.
Ornament is stanzaic.
Pattern is a matter of lines.
The poetic hunger of the old Italians is magnificent, their animal, youthful appetite for harmony, their sensual lust after rhyme—il disio.
The mouth works, the smile moves the verse line, the lips are cleverly and merrily crimson, the tongue presses itself trustfully to the roof of the mouth.
The inner image of the verse is inseparable from the numberless changes of expression which flit across the face of the teller of tales as he talks excitedly.
For that is exactly what the act of speech does: it distorts our face, explodes its calm, destroys its mask.
When I began to study Italian and had only just become slightly acquainted with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of the speech movements had been shifted closer to the lips, to the external mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly acquired a place of honor. The sound rushed toward the canal lock of the teeth. Another observation that struck me was the infantile quality of Italian phonetics, its beautiful childlike quality, its closeness to infant babbling, a sort of immemorial Dadaism:3
e, consolando, usava l’idioma
che prima i padri e le madri trastulla:
. . . . . . .
favoleggiava con la sua famiglia
de’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.4
(Paradiso, XV, 122–123, 125–126)
Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to enter into concordanza.
There is a marvelous abundance of endings that are wed to each other. The Italian verb gains force as it approaches its end and only in the ending does it live. Every word hastens to burst forth, to fly from the lips, go away, and clear a place for the others.
When it became necessary to trace the circumference of a time for which a millennium was less than the wink of an eyelash, Dante introduced an infantile “transsense”5 language into his astronomical, concertante, deeply public, pulpit lexicon.