Osip Mandelstam (II) — The Stream of Golden Honey

Description:

Osip Mandelstam (1891 – 1938) was born in Warsaw, Poland, during the period of the Russian Imperial Empire. He is recognized as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, writing amidst a climate of intense, even apocalyptic, political and cultural upheaval. He was an artist unwilling to bend to the demands of the Soviet state, and — after encountering varying degrees of suppression — was formally exiled in 1934. His wife Nadezhda accompanied him into exile, specifically to the Ural mountain town of Cherdyn on the banks of the Kolva River. On the train to Cherdyn, it is said that Nadezhda read Pushkin to her fragile husband – particularly, his 1825 poem The Gypsies, which references the exile of the Roman poet Ovid across the Black Sea for his own "carmen et error" ("poetry and a mistake") in 8 CE. Whilst this period of exile in Cherdyn was eventually mitigated, he was arrested again in 1938. Mandelstam disappeared into the maze of the Soviet gulag camp system, and was announced to have died later that same year. 

Excerpt:

THE STREAM OF GOLDEN HONEY

for Vera Stravinsky

The stream of golden honey trickled out of the bottle, so viscous
And so very slow, that the lady of the house had time to say:
Here, in sad Tauride, where our destiny has brought us,
We are not bored—she glanced over her shoulder—not in any way.

Everywhere they are working for Bacchus, as if the world held only
Watchmen and dogs—as you pass by, you won’t see anyone—
The quiet days are like ponderous barrels, rolling along:
There are voices far off in a hut—you won’t understand them, you
won’t reply.
After tea we went outside, into a wide brown garden;
Dark blinds like eyelashes hung to the window-sills,
We went past the white columns to look at the vines,
Where the crystal air poured down over sleeping hills.

I said: the vine is alive, like some battle of long ago,
Where curling ranks of curl-crested riders charge.
The science of Hellas is in stony Tauride, and so
The rusted furrows are here, the noble gold acreage.

Well, yes, and silence stands like a spinning-wheel in the white
chamber.It smells of paint, of vinegar, of cool wine from the cellar.
The wife in the Greek house, that they all loved—do you remember—
Not Helen—the other one—how long she used to embroider?

Golden Fleece, where are you, Golden Fleece?
All voyage long the crashing of heavy waves,
And leaving his ship, its sails worn thin by the seas,
Odysseus came home, sated with time and space.

(1917)

Explanation: 

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s The Stream of Golden Honey (1917) draws powerfully upon concepts of the voyage as a process of transition, discovery, and reckoning. It establishes an understanding of time passing like liquid honey or the crashing tide. Across Mandelstam's verse, both time and space are something with which humanity might find themselves “sated”, overwhelmed, or exhausted. Themes of escape, alienation, and a sense of time thrust out of joint permeate Mandelstam’s work. Writing around the moment of 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (a period of apocalyptic political and cultural upheaval), he engages with the littoral as a metaphor for ontological and historical instability, and contemplation upon the means by which our own personal histories, language, and selves find preservation.

Citation: Mandelstam, Osip. Two Poems from Tristia. The New York Review of Books, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, 2 Dec. 1982, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/12/02/two-poems-from-tristia/.