Osip Mandelstam

Yet to die. Unalone still. For now your pauper-friend is with you. Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains, And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow. Live quiet and consoled In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution. Blessed are those days and nights. The work of this sweet voice is without sin. Misery is he whom, like a shadow, A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down. Poor is he who, half-alive himself Begs his shade for pittance. January 15-16, 1937

Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk. In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such silence?

Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you. I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call you either joy or love. All my own blood is gone. Something strange paces there now. Another moment and I will tell you: it's not joy but torture you give me. I'm drawn to you as to a crime— to your ragged mouth, to the soft bitten cherry. Come back to me, I'm frightened without you. Never had you such power over me as now. Everything I desire appears to me. I'm not jealous any more. I'm calling you.

The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk. The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat. Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the bottom of the sea the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’. For death is innocent, and the heart, all through the nightingale-fever, however it turns, is still warm.

Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers, the great year of twilight! A thick forest of nets has been let down into the seething waters of night. O sun, judge, people, desolate are the years into which you are rising! Let us praise the momentous burden that the people’s leader assumes, in tears. Let us praise the twilight burden of power, its weight too great to be borne. Time, whoever has a heart will hear your ship going down. We have roped swallows together into legions. Now we can’t see the sun. Everywhere nature twitters as it moves. In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets and the sun can’t be seen. But what can we lose if we try one groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder? The earth swims. Courage, brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow. Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember the ten heavens the earth cost us.

Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the wasted, lying times. The age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth. When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb arm of his son, who’s already senile. I know the breath growing weaker by the day Not long not till the simple song of the wrongs of earth is cut off, and a tin seal put on the lips. O life of earth! O dying age! I’m afraid no one will understand you but the man with the helpless smile of one who has lost himself. O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids to look for a lost word, and with lime slaking in the veins, to hunt for night herbs for a tribe of strangers! The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin. There’s no escaping the tyrant century. After all these years the snow still smells of apples. I want to run away from my own doorstep, but where? Out in the street it’s dark, and my conscience glitters ahead of me like salt strewn on the pavement. Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses, an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat, forever trying to button the lap-robe. Street after street flashes past, the frozen runners crunch like apples ; can’t get the button through the button-hole, it keeps slipping out of my fingers. The winter night thunders like iron hardware through the Moscow streets. Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam, flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room. Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her. ‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind. I still respect the brotherhood of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’ The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow. Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled. The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep, what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you. Beautiful winter, and the goat sky has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk. And the lap-robe flaps and rings like horse-hair against the frozen runners. And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves, swallowed snow, raspberry, ice, endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina, recalling nineteen-twenty. The frost is smelling of apples again. Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers the great vow to the Fourth Estate and oaths solemn enough for tears? Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship? What other lie will you dream up? There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key, you’ll find a little bone of a pike. And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter. But the simple sonatina of typewriters is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face. It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere. Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle: Miraculous, the breathing plain. Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty— The squint itself consoled, at ease . . . The ten-fold forest almost the same . . . And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread. January 16, 1937