| To the memory of Osip Mandelstam |
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With a tense swift flight, Where the blue is clear and luminous, Under the sky, high to the point of tears, Words are chasing after one another. In them is the song of Hellenic elision And the hail of Latin pyrrhic feet, The torment of Italian dipthongs And the play of French sonorants. It delights me to watch the omnipotence Of their flight and compare the sounds Of the taut springtide wings As they beat in the stiff dazzling breeze.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Homage to Mandelstam, Cambridge, 1981) |
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They glare at you out of the night, Points of departure and of flight; And anguished, naked, to your eyes In empty space the walls arise, When once again the time is here To pass the threshold of the door.
Translated from the Russian
by Carol Rumens with the author (Poetry Nottingham, 41-3), |
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And let me tell you more: the earth in the painful beauty of falling leaves, just as it is, I accept, with you, and without you, need no other. The sky deploys the clouds, far away from us, over the horizon, as though with a rheostat, dimming the sunset across the zones of longitude. So it must be: the shiver of foliage, wind, the heart's disturbance and the spirit's, the play of shadows in the light, quickening sight and inward hearing — autumn has spread out before us all its painted merchandise and in the sunset hour has agitated the music of earth's favourite story.
Translated from the Russian
by Anne Stevenson with the author (Seneca Review, XVII-1; Imago, 6-1, Outposts 180/, 41-3), |
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Go quicker! — I shout out after you. Rain is beginning. Go quicker so that the eyes remain dry, that they do not get clouded. Save them from downpours of destiny — I myself have come dry from the water. On the boulevards of Moscow rain covers the footprints with mica... ...Covers up the traces, washes over the traces, conceals the traces in water. 1971 Paris
Translated from the Russian
by Chris Newman with the author (Paris/Atlantic, 9) |
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What if you know you're right? The leaves Tumble in water, and the notebook's Torn, the spacious heaped-up clouds Plaited about by branches... Shades Crowded the raft, and like a cerecloth The river has unwound its bed... You have No rights, and once upon your knees — There is no getting up. Euphrates And Kerulen have both passed by, And Acheront was gulping down The dew, while all the time the trial Went on, conducted in the depth Of the voracious gloom by huge Density of boulders. And the foot Suited the frame, and then he went Down into the falling of the leaves Coincident with fallen springtime, And terror tried to pass for dream, And in that dream I could make out Cast-iron hooks upon the wall... But through the rift between the timbers The spaciousness above the brows Was mirrored when the verdict rose And tore the shame from off the clouds. And I saw: from a leaf the rightness Was being still born, and discovered That terror's sleepy thickets fall Apart together with the poem, And knew the last captivity To be the bowing of the knees From their own weight, and now already They are light for the loosening hand.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Poetry Ireland 7) |
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Life, with what names you confuse and embarrass us, speak to us across the dreams of a fragile hour; you bring back to life the lost faces, resurrect voices, you disturb with trembling lashes, pain the eyes. Reading through your lines, I fell alive into sleep; by the road a willow-tree was bent by the wind.
Translated from the Russian
by Carol Rumens with the author (Ambit 100) |
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Upon their rocking sleigh, over the snow, The deep and powdery snow, two cronies skim — The vole and the bear — across the wide Onega To where the Pine-Tree Princes wait for them In high bows, holding council to discuss How poetry in the days to come might rate, Days of stark lies and mental durance — And shortly now all in the copse shall meet.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Times Literary Supplement July 23, 2004) |
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Wring your hands, twist your arms like the river. The laughing willow calls me To where the cranes are flying over the Lama, Epithalamial, in love, flooding its banks. Their clear path is Alhambra, halberds, Calabria, crafted, with its Huge clouds of alabaster, Back – into the deluge, the laughter, the oblivion.
Translated from the Russian
by the author with Chris Newman (Times Literary Supplement July 23, 1982) |
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A great wave crashed against the dry land: The loud speech of the sea, its language of menace. Let your journey go on, Do not hurry your voyage. Under the slanted heights of sails, Searching out paths across the sea, Through the turbulent channels, Between the ramparts of merciless straits, Along vast coasts taking the waves askew, In strong cerulean winds, Into the spaces of ocean. The mountain mists are clearing, And a soft wind is stirring the grass. Trees stretch forth Their cold carved branches. The light-blue bark smoothens, And the thin leaves quiver. Young saplings thrust themselves Through solid stone. The garden has fallen silent. In the motionless calm, like sequins, Gossamer drifts onto the ponds.
Translated from the Russian
by Anne Stevenson with the author (Poetry Wales 22-2, Arc 34) |
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A swift, familiar river just outside my window, as if a dream is being dreamt by both of us together. The evenings draw in and grow cooler. In the deep blue distance stormclouds sail over, showing, in a dream, dark ships. There, by the free-flowing water your doppelganger rises eager to watch the white steamer looming beyond the foliage; by the berry-rife bushes, a shed, a bridge, a gate, flitting birds — and, as if in an unclear dream, the faces returning. He alone who changes one waking moment to another knows the meaning of the figurative graphic countenances: praise then, my brother, my other-world friend, by the voice of our school bell these tall-topped trees by the water, this house beneath the sky.
Translated from the Russian by Anne Stevenson
and John Heath-Stubbs, with the author (Agenda 404) |
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Never — I presume — Our time to love has run its course, And where there were once triple dots for the pauses, Last year's autumn days are this year's anniversary season... ...Travelling at seventy miles an hour That's more than a hundred kilometres), ...Destiny, riding a radiant wind, is ascending its circuits, In widening spirals, As I came, so will I leave in its wake, Owing nothing, no one in my debt but myself, ...How many sleepers have calendared memories between us — You cannot imagine; The sky above different lands, still the same; Through graveyards of centuries, ...Uncertain of tread, Returning, the wind of eternity climbs through its coils, As alcohol — Over what he has seen: My guilt, and the wind sits in judgement, It is time for the stones to be cast away,
1971
New York
Translated from the Russian
by Peter Porter with the author (Yale Literary Magazine 150-1) |
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It is all — a Fantasy-Impromptu. From the mazurka, letters and love There's only one step, in the major key like a station, To Majorca, coughing blood. Only one moment, natural as taking flight: A belfry, icarian wings, rocking asleep... All through the night, someone again Composes himself a requiem.
1971
Paris
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (South Carolina Review 37-1) |
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At a run, at a run, taking it so, a wisp of Hair is whipped over the lips, and at once there is no Question of taking back or of forgetting. Only the fingers, assured and relentless, hover, Ready their grip, then stoop to the cadence — they Press home on, and relish. The term fulfilled, the flow Of the rising tide makes brief, while spume escorts it, The passage from Ortygia to Delos.
1977
London
Translated from the Russian
by Donald Davie with the author (Poetry New Zealand XIX) |
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The light green waves of the grasses begin. On the left, above the shoulder of the field, under a weighted sky someone parallel to me moving and not moving to my rhythm — black and sharp, feet cut off by the horizon, like an amateur snapshot printed on hard paper. And then the forest begins.
Translated from the Russian
by Peter Porter with the author (Westerly 47) |
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A great wind drives them from both shores, out crosswise through marches of trans-frontier air; earth's entire emptiness flies headlong there, where terrors of a lull hold breath and wait. The earth's entire wretched vacuousness and triviality are hurled mile after mile among the stars, miles beyond million miles glutted with the universal emptiness. Scattered abroad like castaways they race along the paths of far and unmapped feet; dispersed in death, they run only to meet the totally inhuman cold of space. (Poetry New York 7, Ambit 100)
Translated from the Russian
by Edwin Morgan (Poetry New York 7, Ambit 100) |
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The green leaf attached to the stem The rain in dusty cities The thunder of the sea against the reefs The richly flowered fields The broken path of branches The smell of dust in cities The quiet land and the loud sea The thin silt of the lake The rain over the city The itching skin of the seed The freshening waves The bitterness of herbs The sap of birches Rushing into rhythm Of swift-flowing blood The smell of wetted dust, the sudden fear of death
Translated from the Russian
by Peter Porter with the author (New England Review [Australia] 19, 2004, Meanjin 62-4) |
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"Nicht einen Band, mein Kind, ein Kapitel." And I, coming out of the room with the notice "Herren", ascending to the bow of the steamer, watching the sparse gulls in the cold wind (for'ard — the sails of triangulated bridges, our steamer is heading for the Loreley), I examine the snapshots — the two of them look so alike, cabinet-maker, professor, my grandfather and my grandfather's cousin. "Professor Dubnov," that's how the girl would address him, his neighbour's little sister, in the year thirty three, in Berlin, that fair city, on a promenading Sunday morning. I who have walked in the forests near Riga where he was shot by his pupil look through German windows at German children who play with a German shepherd-dog in a German yard. It was there in Berlin in some strasse, Rulahstrasse, in fact, was its name, only a hundred yards from the Grunewald, and Dubnov and his wife had come back from their walk. And I think, listening to the peals from German belfries, how could he have been so wrong, a distinguished historian, he who had brought back the ages in all their particulars. Thus she asked him, that girl (what happened to her?), when, coming back from their walk, one summer morning in Berlin they greeted their neighbours in front of the house: "Professor Dubnov, you will probably add, because of what's happening to us in Germany, a new volume, einen neuen Band, to your many-volumed work." And he answered, with a wave of his hand: "No, child, not a volume, only a chapter." And I like to think he answered that way because he saw how the pillar of fire veered towards a sea-coast. But seeking for refuge, he fled to Riga, that was a mistake. And what History teaches us — I find it hard to perceive. In Germany I am confused; close by, in an elegant cafe which doubtless was then just the same white-haired Germans are sitting — returning, I lift the receiver (and his Heidelberg student who shot them for teaching them humanism), I dial a Heidelberg number, and I talk to a beautiful young German girl, to a fraulein Christiane — dein goldenes Haar Margarete — there's the tremor of love in her voice — in this age of the ending of humanism, and will it be only a chapter, or a whole volume and was the old Jewish historian right, shot not for his race in the forests near Riga.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Literary Review, June 1983) |
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Time’s car’s fast approaching — soon Body’s lease will be withdrawn, And already we can see Sandy-shored eternity. That is why the nightingale Sings its melody so well In love’s gardens. Who masters the accountancy Of life, death, immortality — Who watches migrant leaves go past In all their mutability.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Poetry Canada Review 7-4) |
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But still across the earth, what power Lies in the striving to be free! …Between its rigid banks the river Slides, benumbed by its timidity. The river has no choice, it must submit To their unyielding vigilance: The oceans, so the banks will tell it, Are likewise subject to obedience. Yet surely there must be a reason Why, in defiance of all sense, The river still has in its season Whirlpools, waterfalls, cross-currents. It’s not by chance, when times are stormy, The river more and more expands – Determined on its liberty, In anger it beats down the banks.
1968
Moscow
Translated from the Russian
by D.J.Enright with the author (Poetry London 41) |
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Agitated by its total liberty, the wave is swelling and advancing, marching towards the shore in line ahead, commanding what exists for you and me. Living and dying teach us thus to raise freedom to the height, and that is why, tensing yet again my lips, I say to you approaching the sea is always the first time.
Translated from the Russian
by Peter Porter with the author (Poetry London 41) |
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The Afghani man explained: Home in our country and in our language pakhto freedom's a word that also means honour and life — and thus we might say: "He's forgone his dignity, and so his life, having been stripped of freedom." My native land lies where every spring the jonquil's blossoming, with its brief lovely life... There's no worse insult for us to throw at any man but this: "You're left without pakhto!" — and that will mean: without will, life and honour — without tongue. Yes, language too deserts a people when their liberty has left them... But already from those peaks of the towering Hindu Kush the free wind brings to me the shepherd's voice.
1984
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (South Carolina Review 37-1) |
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Seeing all the tricks and crookery Of the boss-rooks in his rookery, Johnny Rook took such a fit Of laughter that his belly split. His doctor said: "Don't laugh so much!" — A wise old crow who, with deft touch, Put the final stitches in — "For a while don't even grin!"
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (The Spectator, 29 March 1986) |
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There once was a pismire, And he had his house Among silvery boughs. His friend the nightingale Nested in the galingale Down by the quagmire. The small, velvet-coated Blind mouldywarp's Home was the dome Of a skirling starling. On both the friends he doted: "I'll leave my closet," He said, "and I'll visit Those two, and I'll hear Them sing a motet Both loud and clear, With flats and sharps, As a duet."
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Anthology Island of the Children, London, 1987) |
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I had rubbed myself with a towel And stood in the silence and looked At the darkened garden And the night firmament. The heavens were all in black-blue, Deep and luminous; The night was partly cloudy. Above a huge fir-tree Falling as a shadow on the sky Three stars quivered And the moon brushed the clouds from its face. I stood and marvelled At fate's poignant fairy-tale, And I felt: all was life, Only life, Only by life from life, By the transparent green water, Beside the very bench, Near the dark windows of the house Where they were already asleep.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Mississippi Review 16-1) |
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The lapis lazuli is to be found Among the Urals — it's of baser grade; And in Afghanistan there also is Lapis lazuli, the costliest sort, And literally it's worth its weight in gold. The Russian lapis lazuli is easily Distinguished from the Badakhshan variety: Discoloured it is — yes, quite a lot discoloured; The Afghan kind is largely free from that — In it five specks at most will pass muster Per square centimetre... So the wagons From Badakhshan towards the neighbouring region — Soviet Tadzhikistan — went trundling on. It must be in this sort the Afghan people Expressed their infinite gratitude To Russia for her comradely assistance.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Staple 28) |
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At opening of September it appears there's twice as many leaves as there had been in the last week of August: they increase with every day and hour, and so pile up upon one's path like red and yellow snowdrifts... Over there was a passage through the greenery not so long ago since where by the hand I led a girl companion with a high clear forehead (we had to stoop a little as we went so as not to brush against the branches). And now there are two bushes of some kind there, lawn as well — with no concealment, nor mystery, nor thrill, nor taking risks where the way out is unpredictable. Just like a gardener with a saw, life amputates the branches of the years and opens up the empty spaces where dogs frisk about, and pigeons strut, and children play their games, and where no trace remains of our past selves.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Contemporary Verse2, 29-2) |
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A soggy spongy mass that towel became Which had been hung out all night to dry From the window. A railway station may With suddenness show up, as in a film. And now among the layered-out clouds is light, And higher up, behind their solid screen. Already before you and me the train Is growing heavy in its distant flight. And we still by the coloured, black-and-white, Wet, dry timetable of the eyes must live, Greeting the sun there yet again above, Seemingly, fields of ripened rye or wheat.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Fiddlehead 203, Ambit 162) |
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A single leaf hangs in the air on a spider-thread; at the horizon a vista of sky and earth is meeting as we pick our narrow way across an autumn field of just-sown wheat and further on along a forest path to where a reservoir opens. This, it seems to us, becomes the river flowing around Muscovite domes where on a little porch our memory lies down, as both the wretched poor stride on cobbled roads and aristocrats ride slick trotters into the age's storms. The way there and the passage back lie along black back stairs and front portals, sentries cloaked in greenery. Coming close, we see how clear the evening air is, and how tremulously a single leaf hangs down.
Translated from the Russian
by Maxine Kumin with the author (Raritan Review XXVII-3) |
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A wide, snow-covered field, and icy hills Surround it; on each of them a boy, and he Makes his sledge ready for the perilous slide. Far off behind the hill and forest someone On a grown-up bed sleeps on, disturbed With childhood dreams and all illuminated By the cipher of the moon. Trees stand In white; it hurts, and it cannot be quietened. And now a girl sporting a red head-dress And a brilliant blue cloak, but gloveless, With her bare hands takes from between birch-branches Indistinct glimmerings of the snow.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (New Orleans Review 32-2) |
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The steps of birdsong we ascend toward death reflect the rising sun's foreign rays and at this season eyes ever more often seek a living cluster on the upper tiers full of its own harmony among bare branches and emergent buds, leaves that tear themselves off and turn green.
Translated from the Russian
by Maxine Kumin with the author (The Midwest Quarterly XLIX-1, Raritan Review XXVII-3) |
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The teachers' staff room opened up more or less on the river Thames; in the Great Hall at close-packed desks the upper sixth sat their exams. There I was standing at a table, watching the meadow and the bank; impudently young, Spring entered and made me gasp like someone drunk. Breathtaking, so much beauty was; she went on and on calling for me to follow the stream and go to a place with no returning.
Translated from the Russian
by Anne Ridler and John Heath-Stubbs, with the author (Modern Poetry in Translation 3-10) |
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Not death inside the frozen slave campNor execution in a blood-drenched cellar, Not flash of axe or shattered lamp, The poplar's cry, earth drained of colour: Over the bitter land angry winds arise, The storm has come to wash away the dross, Slaking thirst, cleansing eyes And brightening every face.
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Neither death nor the sea but the hoarse And caressing voice of the flute Moving mankind to confute The wound at the century's source; So summer, her arms filled with corn, Would follow the spring, and the year Would banish suspicion and fear, With its seasons properly worn. As fresh as the colour and scent Of the lilac, the sound of the flute Makes audible all that was mute; From earth's confines it makes its ascent To the great arching firmament's height: So flautist, play on and enhance Our life with the grace of the dance, Of terrestrial music and light.
1990-1991
London
Translated from the Russian
by Vernon Scannell with the author (Modern Poetry in Translation 3-10) |
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Bringing closer, pushing further sky's and earth's perimeter where the birds are disappearing, life once more is promising the very childhood smell of jasmine, lilac, and the first, as on Creation's opening day, ecstatic intimation of the sea.
Translated from the Russian
by Peter Porter with the author (Denver Quarterly34-3, Poetry New Zealand 21) |
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Far away or near, Above each hill, With a celestial eye Following us still — The cumulus gazes, The high cirrus glances, See the poison vial, Note the galloping horses, Behold the hooves That seem to skim the ground, And how with a film Verona's streets are pearled, How dewdrops without leave Descend on balconies And garden-plots, and Swift luminous fireflies Dance over burial vaults, And how, beyond the brink Of the river's course The evening sun has sunk In its tranquillity, And halfway onward there Across the arching sky Distance has grown obscure...
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Acumen 47) |
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Is there a print left by the toes upon the umbered surface of the stone on which the farmer's daughter stepped in the springtime to reach the top of the fence between the cornfield and the water-meadow — I would like to have inquired whether somewhere there does not remain the trace of her delicate foot, if the memory lingers of her way of walking or of her running, or of her body's resting in the grass by the waterside? She had drowned, they told me, last autumn, swimming by night in the cold river.
Translated from the Russian
by John Heath-Stubbs with the author (Ploughshares, 28-1) |
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Strange then you will suddenly hear in cities clear footfalls of May and open the window to blue: it is then in this autumn undressing that spring steps again, that borders emerge in a mist as words, and bridges — a girl's slender waist, and features — the sounds of a fugue.
Translated from the Russian
by Ali Smith with the author (Ambit 162, Poetry Durham 34) |
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I make my way to the empty house: Once, in there, children laughed and cried. So I face the past: the place Where the living died. She stands there again at the window High, on that upper floor, Telling the children, “Now don’t you go Too far off! – as so often before – And I’m stopped: the beat Of a footfall would be too rude, They’d be too light, these feet For such heavy solitude.
Translated from the Russian
Herbert Lomas with the author (Poetry Review 89-2) |
