‘These steppes’ refers to the area around Voronezh.
I am indebted to R. Chandler for drawing my attention to the fact that ‘here are all my rights’ refers to Pushkin’s poem From Pindemonte (1836), in which he says he doesn’t mind about censorship, not having the right to vote, etc.; all he cares about is that he should be left to himself, not have to give account to others of what he does, and be free to wonder at the godlike beauties of nature and art: ‘Here is my happiness! Here are my rights…’
R. F. Holmes has pointed out to me that ‘of course both poets did care about other things than being left to themselves… Mandelshtam, besides attacking Stalin, attacked one Caesar at least, two Tsars, Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini.’ (In Rome, composed in 1937, Rome is characterized as a ‘nursery for murder’; ‘The degenerate chin of the dictator/Sags over Rome’).
(367) This poem was written during the time when Mandelshtam was particularly obsessed with Joseph Stalin. Wasp, in Russian, is osa, axis is os’. Joseph, in Russian, can be either Osip or Iosif.
O.M. ‘obviously listed here some of the arts officially… encouraged in the mid-thirties, the period of violin-competitions, portrait-painting, the revival of the classical opera…’ (O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandelshtam).
(368) The last poem in Mandelshtam’s Stalin cycle. Scythe, in Russian, is ‘kosa’. The cuckoo, as also in ‘the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower’ (no. 121), alludes to a passage from The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, a twelfth-century poem in which Yaroslavna, Igor’s wife, mourns him ‘like a desolate cuckoo’. ‘On the Danube Yaroslavna’s voice is heard: like a desolate cuckoo she cries early in the morning. “I will fly,” she says, “like a cuckoo along the Danube, I will dip my sleeve of beaver-fur in the river Kayala, I will wipe the Prince’s bleeding wounds…”’ (Penguin Book of Russian Verse, edited by D. Obolensky). ‘[Mandelshtam] lamented his failing eyesight, which had once been “sharper than a whetted scythe” but had not had time to pick out each of the “lonely multitude of stars”.’ (N.M., Hope Against Hope.)
(370) Here O.M., according to D. Rayfield, sees himself as Daniel who championed Israel (Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975).
‘The singer is free to descend into the lion’s den, since her voice can conquer the lion, escape from the fortress – Marian Anderson’s speciality was negro spirituals…’ (J. Baines).
The poem combines two images: of Marian Anderson, whose deep voice O.M. had heard on the radio; and of a singer friend whose husband had just been re-arrested after recent release from five years in a camp. (See Hope Against Hope, chapter 39.)
(384) N.M., the ‘child’ or ‘little one’, is entrusted in this lullaby to the care of the stars because ‘the radiance of the stars is also that of his poetry’ (J. Baines).
O.M. was embarrassed, as far as eventual publication might be concerned, by the intimacy of what he called ‘these verses of the bed.’
(385) ‘… Hera was first worshipped in the form of a cow’ (J. Baines).
(387) ‘The Greek flute’s sounds are clearly the poetic force before it has been precipitated in language… [The] flute’s music… crosses barriers, it is unselfconscious… The poet creates his own past; “making his native sea” out of clay, like the Cretan potters… [But] the flautist is in the past, unrepeatable. He is what the poet might have been or continued being, had the Hellenic world not fallen apart. Now nothing works: the sea gives no birth… [it] kills instead of giving life… [Mandelshtam’s] lips cannot work the flute, and the balance of forces… topples, leaving only the destructive, negative force to silence poetry… If there is a moral in the poem, it is that the poet, conscious of his individual death, is tainted by his fear and loses his gift of immersing himself in the medium of poetry’ (D. Rayfield, Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1975).
Rayfield points out that sea (more) changes into its phonetic twin plague (mor) – which I have rendered as disease; similarly the ‘syllable ub joins the flautist’s mouth (zuby, teeth, and guby, lips) in a fatal conjunction with death (ubiystvo, murder…). – This sort of thing, of course, drives the translator to despair, if not self-destruction.
N.M. writes about this poem in Hope Against Hope, chapter 39: ‘Since he works with his voice, a poet’s lips are the tools of his trade, and in… [this] poem O.M. is also speaking about his own whispering lips and the painful process of converting into words the sounds ringing in his ears… The poem is… about a flute player we knew… He would bring great comfort to O.M. by playing Bach or Schubert for him. Schwab… [was] accused of espionage and sent to a camp for common criminals… He was already an old man and he ended his days there.’
(388) Henry Gifford discusses an early poem by Pasternak where the latter mentions ‘sticky greenery’, which seems to evoke the ‘sticky little leaves opening in spring’ that reconciled Ivan Karamazov to life (Henry Gifford, Pasternak).
(394) The limping woman was Natasha Shtempel, whom the Mandelshtams knew in Voronezh.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Passages from the following works are quoted in the Notes by permission:
Jennifer Baines, Mandelshtam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Clarence Brown, Mandelshtam (Cambridge University Press, London and New York, 1973).
Steven Broyde, Osip Mandelshtam and His Age (Harvard University Press, 1975).
Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Henry Gifford, Pasternak (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Poetry in a Divided World (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, copyright © 1970 and copyright © 1972 respectively by Atheneum Publishers; English translation copyright © 1970 and copyright © 1973, 1974 respectively by Atheneum Publishers, New York and Harvill Press Ltd, London (published by Atheneum Publishers, New York, and William Collins and Harvill Press, London).
Chapter 42 and Osip Mandelshtam, ‘The Goldfinch’ and Other Poems, translated with an introduction by Donald Rayfield (The Menard Press, 1973).
Osip Mandelshtam, Complete Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ardis, 1979).
Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Essays, translated and edited with an introduction by Sidney Monas (University of Texas Press, 1977).
Osip Mandelshtam’s ‘Stone’, translated with an introduction by Robert Tracy (Princeton University Press, 1981).
Sidney Monas, notes to Complete Poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, translated by Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (by permission of the State University of New York Press; copyright © 1973 State University of New York).
N. A. Nilsson, Osip Mandelshtam: Five Poems (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1974).