Translations of four poems by Osip Mandelstam
by Alistair Noon
[ poetry - july 11 ]
Osip Mandelstam was a member of the Acmeist group of writers and is a major figure in 20th Century Russian poetry. Born in Warsaw in 1891, he died in died in a labour camp in the Soviet Far East in 1938.
An anthology of ancient nonsense (1)
The wind tears yellow leaves from the tops of the trees.
Lesbia! Over here! Look at all these fig-leaves!
*
Phoebus goes for a spin across the sky, in his golden chariot.
When he comes back tomorrow, he’ll take just the same route.
*
‘Lesbia! Where have you been?’ ‘In the arms of Morpheus’.
‘Don’t lie to me, woman! I was in them myself!’
*
The noise of the taps drowns out the rowdy voices. Are you the host?
Run that bath by all means, but don’t run away from your guests!
*
‘I love you!’ he screamed for the thousandth time, as the deed was done.
No doubt we’ll get to hear him make it one thousand and one.
To Dmitri Shepelenko
No weavers of silk but only wool -
what a miserable tribe we are!
Brainfuddling words keep our notebooks full.
Our fate sweats along, but doesn’t get far.
To a writer
As if some prophet down from talking with the Lord,
gibbering, you lumber towards your next award.
From Verses for Natasha Stempel
Here comes Natasha. Where’s she been?
She really must eat. She really must drink.
Black as the night, her mother sniffs.
Her daughter smells of onions and wine.
It is an inconvenience
It is an inconvenience
that I’m not Heinrich Heine.
Leaders? No, cheats
would be the rhyme I’d find.
