Tortoise

On the stony spurs of Pierius
The Muses conducted the first round dance
So like bees, blind lyrists might give us Ionic honey.
A great chill blew
From the prominent virginal brow
So the tender graves of the Archipelago
Might be uncovered for distant grandsons.

2

Spring rushes to trample the meadows of Hellas,
Sappho puts on a dappled boot,
Cicadas click like hammers forging out a ring,
As in the little song.
A stout carpenter built a tall house,
They strangled all the hens for a wedding,
An inept cobbler stretched
All five ox-hides for shoes.

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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In Petersburg we'll meet again

In Petersburg we'll meet again,
As though we'd buried the sun there,
And for the first time utter
The blessed, senseless word.
In the black velvet of Soviet night,
In the velvet of worldwide emptiness,
The kind eyes of touched women still sing,
The immortal flowers still bloom.

2

The capitol arches like a wildcat,
A patrol is standing on the bridge,
A single angry motor speeds by in the dark,
And cries out like a cuckoo.
I do not need a pass for the evening,
I am not afraid of the sentries:
I will pray in the Soviet night
For the blessed and senseless word.

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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I don’t remember the word I wished to say

I don’t remember the word I wished to say.
The blind swallow returns to the hall of shadow,
on shorn wings, with the translucent ones to play.
The song of night is sung without memory, though.

No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
The manes of night’s horses are translucent.
An empty boat drifts on the naked river.
Lost among grasshoppers the word’s quiescent.

It swells slowly like a shrine, or a canvas sheet,
hurling itself down, mad, like Antigone,
or falls, now, a dead swallow at our feet.
with a twig of greenness, and a Stygian sympathy.

O, to bring back the diffidence of the intuitive caress,
and the full delight of recognition.
I am so fearful of the sobs of The Muses,
the mist, the bell-sounds, perdition.

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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If I am to know how to restrain your hands

If I am to know how to restrain your hands,
If I am to betray the tender, salty lips,
I must wait for daybreak in the dense acropolis.
How I hate those ancient weeping timbers .

Achaian men equip their steeds in darkness.
With jagged saws they rip firmly into the walls.
The dry fuss of blood does not subside at all,
And for you there is no name, no sound, no mold.

How could I imagine you'd return! How bold!
Why did I lose touch with you so prematurely!
The gloom has still not dispersed,
The cock has not finished his song,
The glowing ax has still not entered the pulp.

The resin came forth on the walls like a transparent tear,
And the city feels its wooden ribs,
But the blood rushed out to the stairs, an attack,
And thrice the men dreamed of the seductive figure.

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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The thick golden stream of honey took so long

1

The thick golden stream of honey took so long
To pour, our host had time to say:
'Here in the dismal Taurides, where fate has brought us,
We don't get bored at all' -- and she looked over her shoulder.

2

The services of Bacchus everywhere, as if on earth
Were only guards and dogs. You go along, you notice no one --
Like heavy barrels, the peaceful days roll by:
Far off. Voices in a hut: you cannot understand, nor reply.

3

After tea, we went out in the huge brown garden,
The dark blinds were lowered like eyelashes.

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Straw

I

When you are trying to sleep, Solominka,
In your enormous bedroom, and are waiting,
Sleepless, for the high and weighty ceiling to come down
With quiet, heavy sorrow on your keen eyelids,

Sonorous Solomka, or seasoned Solominka,
You've drunk down all death, grown tender and
Been broken, my dear Solomka, no more alive --
Not Salome, no, it is Solominka.

In hours of insomnia, objects are heavier
As if fewer of them -- such a stillness --
The cushions glitter in the mirror, whitening a bit,
And the bed is reflected in the round pool.

No, it is not Solomka in her solemn satin
In a huge room above the black Neva.
For twelve months they sing of the final hour,

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Tristia

I have studied the Science of departures,
in night’s sorrows, when a woman’s hair falls down.
The oxen chew, there’s the waiting, pure,
in the last hours of vigil in the town,
and I reverence night’s ritual cock-crowing,
when reddened eyes lift sorrow’s load and choose
to stare at distance, and a woman’s crying
is mingled with the singing of the Muse.

Who knows, when the word ‘departure’ is spoken
what kind of separation is at hand,
or of what that cock-crow is a token,
when a fire on the Acropolis lights the ground,
and why at the dawning of a new life,
when the ox chews lazily in its stall,
the cock, the herald of the new life,
flaps his wings on the city wall?

I like the monotony of spinning,
the shuttle moves to and fro,

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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The Menagerie

The rejected word 'peace'
At the beginning of an outraged era;
A church lamp in a grotto
And the air of mountain lands
An ether we did not want to,
Or would not breathe.
Again, with a goat-voice,
The shaggy reed-pipes sing.

While sheep and oxen grazed
On fertile pastures,
And friendly eagles perched
On the shoulders of sleepy crags --
A German reared an eagle,
A lion submitted to a Briton,
And a Gallic comb appeared
From a rooster's crest.

But now the savage has captured
The sacred mace of Heracles,

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poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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