Poem No. 78, and Poem No. 129
- Poem No. 78, and Poem No. 129
78.*
Insomnia. Homer. Taut Sails.I’ve read halfway through the list of ships:that long litter, that train of cranesthat rose once over Hellas.
Like a wedge of cranesacross foreign borders—a holy foam in the hair of the gods—where do you sail? If it weren’t for Helen,what would Troy be to you, Achaean men?
The sea, and Homer, all are moved by love;whom should I obey? Here Homer is silent,but the dark sea, expounding, stirs,and with a heavy crash rolls up to my pillow.
1915 [End Page 129]
129.
A chill pricks the crown of my head,and suddenly it’s impossible to tell the truth—time cuts me offthe way it sliced your thumb.
Life overwhelms me;little by little sound dwindles:everything lets go of somethingthere’s no time to remember.
Wasn’t it better before?But maybe, blood, you don’t comparehow you shuddered before,and how you shudder now.
It’s clear that these lipsdon’t move in vain,and the treetop plays,doomed to be lumber.
1922 [End Page 130]
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was born in Poland and studied in France and Germany. Along with his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak, he published work in the period of artistic freedom before the Russian Revolution of 1917; in time, all these authors would suffer from political suppression under Lenin and Stalin. Mandelstam’s poems are now judged to be among the most memorable and suggestive of the century, but from the time of his death in a labor camp in 1938 until the publication of his collected poems in 1960 in Berlin, he was unknown to non-Russian readers.
Joan Aleshire has been studying and translating Russian poetry for many years. She has published five books of her own poetry, the latest being Happily (Four Way Books, 2012). She has taught in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1983.
Footnotes
* Mandelstam’s poems, the majority of which are untitled short lyrics, are numbered here in accordance with Struve and Filipoff’s Collected Works (Inter-Library Associates, 1967).
