Осип Мандульштам / Osip Mandel'shtam

СТИХИ О НЕИЗВЕСТНОМ СОЛДАТЕ


Этот воздух пусть будет свидетелем,
Дальнобойное сердце его,
И в землянках всеядный и деятельный
Океан без окна—вещество…

До чего эти звезды изветлинвы!
Все им нужно глядеть—для чего?
В осужденье судьи и свидетеля,
В океан без окна, вещество.

Помнит дождь, неприветливый сеятель,—
Безымянная манна его,—
Как лесистые крестики метили
Океан или клин боевой.

Будут люди холодные, хилые
Убивать, холодать, голодать
И в своей знаменитой могиле
Неизвестный положен солдат.

Научи меня, ласточка хилая,
Разучившаяся летать,
Как мне в этой воздушной могилой
Без руля и крыла совладать.

Как сутулого учит могила
И воздушная яма влечет.

Шевелящимися виноградинами
Угрожают нам эти миры
И висят городами украденными,
Золотыми обмолвками, ябедами,
Ядовитого холода ягодами—
Растяжнмых созвездий шатры,
Золотые созвездий жиры…

Сквозь эфир десятично-означенный
Свет размолотых в луч скоростей
Начинает число, опрозрачненный
Светлой болью и молью нулей.

И за полем полей поле новое
Треугольным летит журавлем,
Весть летит светопыльной обновою,
И от битвы вчерашней светло.

Весть летит светопыльной обновою:
— Я не Лейпциг, я не Ватерлоо,
Я не Битва Народов, я новое,
От меня будет свету светло.

Аравийское месиво, крошево,
Свет размолотых в луч скоростей,

И своими косыми подошвами
Луч стоит на сетчатке моей.

Миллионы убитых задешево
Протоптали тропу в пустоте,—
Доброй ночи! Всего им хорошего
От лица земляных крепостей!

Неподкупное небо окопное—
Небо крупных оптовых смертей,—
За тобой, от тебя, целокупное,
Я губами несусь в темноте—

За воронки, за насыпи, осыпи,
По которым он медлил и мглил:
Развороченных—пасмурный, оспенный
И приниженный гений могил.

Хорошо умирает пехота,
И поет хорошо хор ночной
Над улыбкой приплюснутой Швейка,
И над птичьим копьем Дон-Кихота,
И над рыцарской птичьей плюсной.

И дружи́т с человеком калека—
Им обоим найдется работа,
И стучит по околицам века
Костылей деревяниных семейка,—
Эй, товарищество, шар земной!

Для того ль должен череп развиться
Во весь лоб—от виска до виска,—
Чтоб в его дорогие глазницы
Не могли не вливаться войска?

Развивается череп от жизни
Во весь лоб—от виска до виска,—

Чистотой своих швов он дразнит себя,
Понимающим куполом яснится,
Мыслью пенится, сам себе снится,—
Чаша чаш отчизна отчизне,
Звездным рубчиком шитый чепец,
Чепчик счастья—Шекспира отец…

Ясность ясеневая, зоркость яворовая
Чуть-чуть красная мчится в свой дом,
Словно обмороками затоваривая
Оба неба с их тусклым огнем.

Нам союзно лишь то, что избыточно,
Впереди не провал, а промер,
И бороться за воздух прожиточный—
Эта слава другим не в пример.

И сознанье свое затоваривая
Полуобморочным бытием,
Я ль без выбора пью это варево,
Свою голову ем под огнем?

Для того ль заготовлена тара
Обаянья в пространстве пустом,
Чтобы белые звезды обратно
Чуть-чуть красные мчались в свой дом?

Слышишь, мачеха звездного табора,
Ночь, что будет сейчас и потом?

Напиваются кровью аорты,
И звучит по рядам шепотком:
—Я рожден в девяносто четвертом,
—Я рожден в девяносто втором…—
И в кулак зажимая истертый
Год рожденья—с гурьбой и гуртом
Я шепчу обескровленным ртом:
—Я рожден в ночь с второго на третье
Ненадежном году—и столетья
Окружают меня огнем.


1—15 марта 1937

trans. Don Mager

Verses to an Unknown Soldier

Let this air be a witness—
This substance, its far–reaching heart,
And in the omnivorous crowded trenches
Of its windowless—oceanic motion…

Even these stars are informers!
All of them needing to look down—at what?
This substance, judge of both judge and witness,
Its windowless oceanic motion.

The rain, that unkind sower,—
The anonymous manna remembers,—
How wooden dagger–like crosses
Mark an oceanic wedge of fighting.

There will be cold frail people
Who will kill, starve and become colder
And the unknown soldier
Will be placed in his famous tomb.

O frail swallow who has forgotten
How to fly, teach me how,
Without rudder or wing,
I might control this tomb of air.

And I will give you a strict report
On Mikhail Lermontov,1
Just as a tomb trains a humpback
And air pockets draw us in.

These worlds threaten us
With waving grapevines
And hang like pillaged cities
With golden slips of the tongue,
Informers and poisoned cold berries—
With tents of stretched constellations,
With constellations of golden fat…

Through the ether to the power of ten
The speed of light is ground to a beam
Numbering begins, made transparent
By bright pain and the moth–flight of zeros.

Beyond the field is field upon field
Above it flies a “V” of cranes,
And news flies on innovations of light,
And yesterday’s battles light today’s sky.

News flies on innovations of light:
—I’m not Leipzig, I’m not Waterloo,
I’m not the Battle of the Nations,2
I’m a new light to the world.

Arabia is a mess, a total collapse,3
The speed of light is ground to a beam,
And on the oblique soles of its feet
It stands erect on my retina.

To the millions killed cheaply
Who’ve worn a track into emptiness,—
Good night! Well wishes to you all
On behalf this battle–sieged earth!

The incorruptible sky over the trenches—
A sky of vast wholesale death,—
For you and from you, still whole,
I lay my lips to hatch in darkness—

Beyond the crater, rim and rocky debris,
Where the mists have settled and linger:
On a vast scale—are the cloudy graves
Of humbled discarded geniuses.

Infantry soldiers die well
And the nocturnal chorus sings well
Above Schweik’s noncommittal smile,4
And Don Quixote’s bird–leg spear5
With its knightly straightened claw.

The disabled will befriend all men—
There will be work for all of them,
And along the village fences of this age
A small family of crutches is knocking,—
The united comrades of the earthly sphere!

Is this why the skull evolved,
Fullness of forehead—temple to temple,—
So that through the thoroughfare of eyes
The vastness of armies might pour in?

Throughout life the skull evolves
In the entire forehead—temple to temple,—

Teases itself with the exactitude of its seams,
Makes its dome clear with comprehension,
Foams with ideas, dreams itself,—
Chalice of chalices, homeland of homelands,
Cap embroidered with traces of stars,
Cap of happiness—father Shakespeare…

Against the sky with their dim flames,
The clarity of ash, vigilance of sycamore,
Rush, just barely red, into the house
Fainting from their abundance of goodness.

Only the superfluous is allied to us,
Ahead is not failure, but our measure,
And the struggle for the air of life—
This glory is no model for anyone else.

With an abundance of consciousness
For this semiconscious life,
Am I the one with no choice,
And under fire do I eat my own head?

Or am I a container of enchantment
Manufactured in empty space,
So that the receding white stars
Rush, just barely red, into the house?

You, night, stepmother to encampments of stars,
Can you hear what will happen now and then later?

Blood poured out from aortas
Like the sound of countless whispers:
—I was born in ninety–four,
—I was born in ninety–two…—
And clutching the year of my birth
In my fist—among the crowded herd—
I whisper from a stifled mouth:
—I was born at night between the second and the third
Of an unreliable year—and centuries
Surround me with fire.


1–15 March 1937
 

Мандульштам, Осип Эмильевич. Собрание Сочинений. [4 vol.] Ed. Э. Сергеева.  Москва: Арт–Бизнес–Центр, 1993–1997. [Mandelstam, Osip Emilevich. Collected Works. [4 vol.]  Ed. E. Sergeeva. Moscow: Art–Business–Center, 1993–1997]: 3, 124–126.

1 The reference is to Mikhail Lermontov’s (1814-1841) great narrative poema, The Demon (1838) which describes the Demon’s soaring flights through the clouds off into the ether. ↩

2 A coalition of English and Prussian armies defeated Napoleon’s French army at the Battle of Waterloo (June, 18 1815). Over two years earlier, from October 16–19, 1813, a coalition army of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden beat Napoleon’s army near Leipzig in Saxony in the Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations; the French were driven back to France. This was the largest battle in a European war prior to WWI. ↩

3 The Turkish Ottoman Empire entered WWI holding much of the Middle East subject; by the end of the war, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine were either independent or protectorates under League of Nations mandates, and Turkey was a much smaller independent republic. ↩

4 The Good Soldier Švejk (or Schweik) by Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) is the abbreviated title for the unfinished novel, Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, literally The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. This darkly comic novel celebrates the common soldier and lampoons officers and generals with its quintessential anti-hero who despite getting into the most impossible scrapes always lands on his feet. For many it stands as the Czech national novel. ↩

5 The novel Don Quixote (1605–15) with the full title El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) was written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Quixote is the quintessential idealistic anti-hero living in his mental world of outmoded chivalric adventures. ↩

 

Osip Emil’evich Mandel’shtam (1891–1938) was a Russian poet and essayist. He was a founding member of the influential Acmeist movement during the Silver Age before the Russian Revolution. Acmeism opposed the dominant Symbolist aesthetic and placed emphasis on clarity of the word and precision of the image. His first volume, Stone (1913), impacted Russian poetry for the next two decades. In the 1930s he ran afoul of the Soviet authorities and was sent to a gulag in Siberia with his wife Nadezhda (1899–1970). Her autobiography, Hope Against Hope, recounts their years under Stalinist persecution. He was brought back and banished in “internal exile” to the city of Voronezh where for three years he and Nadezhda struggled to survive while he wrote some of his most astonishing poems, collected in Voronezh Notebooks—a manuscript hidden from the authorities until the “Khrushchev thaw” in 1956. In 1938, he was re–sentenced to hard labor and died near Vladivostok in transit to a gulag.

Don Mager lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. His chapbooks and volumes of poetry are: To Track the Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death, Borderings, Good Turns, The Elegance of the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook Drive Time, and Russian Riffs. Now retired, he was the Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University from 1998–2004, where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. As well as a number of scholarly articles, he has published over 200 poems and translations from German, Czech, and Russian.

 
 

More from Vol. 33, Issue 2

Dormant

Tasha Cotter

Ungulate in the Penthouse of the Winter Tick // The Mute Button

David Dodd Lee

Confederacy

Brian Johnson

Reversal: The Movement of Laozi's Dialectical Dao

Laozi, trans. Wong Yoo-Chong

Verses to an Unknown Soldier

Osip Mandel’shtam, trans. Don Mager