11 march 2022

11 march 2022

John Bjarne Grover

From a file I published on my internet homepage in 2005 ('On the web 05 June 2005, Last updated 04 August 2006') - I think the file was entitled 'Mandelstam 1934' - but when I now search for the file among my computer files I cannot find it again anywhere. That is surprising. (Today my internet connection was suddenly ended again when I clicked on China Daily - I believed there should have been still some gigas to go but I wouldnt be all too certain about it - so I went and had a new refill of gigas). I find the article under the legal deposit copy delivered to the austrian national library, though, albeit not as file but as part of a printout of the page. It is a long file with lots of ideas. I bring here some lines from this file plus the translation which I published before the 70 years of copyright had expired:

I have tried to make a reasonably literal translation of Mandelstam's poem, which I suppose I can reproduce here under the cover of citation rights for the critical scientific analysis of its contents relative to the historic background. Mandelstam's authorship is otherwise not public domain before the end of 2008.

The translation is rough and suppresses some ambiguities and may probably also contain errors due to my limited knowledge of the language, for which reason a closer study of the poem should go via the original text. I nevertheless bring it here for the sake of a rough reference.

Osip Mandelstam: 10 January 1934

I am haunted by two-three recurring phrases,
repeating every day: "My sadness is so fat!".
Oh God, how fat and blue-eyed are
those dragonflies of death, how blue their black!

Where's firstbornness? Where is the happy habit?
Where are the hawks that melt on the very same day?
Where's matter? Where's the bitterness of stealth?
The clear body? The linearity of speech -

entangled, like the honest zigzaggings
skating into the blue flame -
the frosted downs on the green slope,
the firmly blue glinting in the river?

For this it is about the uneven spacing of the holes,
those near, those jointed, voices,
of these interior 'rystalline' seeds
presenting themselves every half century, every half hour.

And suddenly opens music in an ambush,
not yet the beastly 'outpour' of occlusives,
not for the sake of hearing nor of pleasure,
the 'outpouring' of muscles and the 'horned' temples -

'Outpouring' for caress, it's only to remove the masks,
the plaster cast not clinging to the feather,
the swelling lips, the consolidated caress,
the rough peace and the goodness...

The fur coats breathing, clamped around the shoulders,
a boiling vermilion of health - of blood and sweat.
Sleep in the jacket of sleep, that once was holding
the dream of taking half a step ahead.

In the middle of the crowd stood the engraver,
ready to transfer onto the true copper
that which the drafters charred on paper
as soon as their own meanness could find time to it.

As if I were hanging from my own eyelashes,
and, puberty-mature, pulling it all,
as long as I'm not picked - I am playing with those faces
of continuum, the only thing we know.

This is in accordance with a Russian edition I recently bought ('Ripol Klassik', Moskva 2001). In the edition of Ralph Dutli, including German translation, the fourth stanza is different. I don't know which was Mandelstam's final version. I translate it as such:

For this, it is about tripled solutions of salt,
the voices of German philosophers
and Russian priority of the seeds
presenting themselves every half century, every half hour.