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 compromise 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 in Cherdyn, a town in the Ural mountains and on the banks of the Kolva River. On the train to Cherdyn, it is said that Nadezhda read Pushkin to her mentally fragile husband – particularly, his 1825 poem The Gypsies, which references the exile of the Roman poet Ovid to the Black Sea coast in 8 CE. Whilst this period of exile in Cherdyn was eventually mitigated, he was arrested again in 1938, and ‘disappeared’ within the maze of the Soviet gulag camp system. He died in a transit camp the same year.

Excerpt:

I have studied the science of saying goodbye
In a night of lamentations with hair unbound.
The oxen chew, and the wait drags on and on
Till the last hour of the city’s vigil comes round,
And I ponder the ritual of that cockcrow night
When I lifted the load of sorrow I must bear
While eyes red from weeping stared somewhere out of sight
And the song of the Muses merged with a woman’s tears.

Who can know, when he hears the word “farewell”
What kind of separation is before us,
Or what it is the crowing cock foretells
When the fire burns upon the acropolis,
And as some new kind of life is dawning,
While the oxen chew lethargically in their stall,
Why the cock, the herald of new life,
Flaps his wings on the city wall?

And so I cherish the familiar rituals of yarn:
The shuttle moves to and fro, the spindle hums,
Look there—running, like a fleck of swansdown,
Barefoot Delia comes!
Ah, this life of ours stands upon a base so thin,
And the language of rejoicing is so poor!
It all happened long ago, it all happens once more,
And nothing is sweet but the moment of recognition.

So be it: a fluid pattern
Spreads across a clean earthen plate
Like a squirrel skin someone has flattened,
Hovering over the wax, a girl waits.
It is not for us to speculate about Greek Erebus,
What wax is for women, bronze is for men.
Fate comes only in battle for us,
But their fate is to die in telling fortunes.

(1918)

Explanation: 

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia (1918) reflects upon exile and departure, composed amidst a period of radical social, political, and cultural transition, and drawing intensely upon the Roman poet Ovid’s account of exile across the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus in 8 CE. Here, the littoral space is explored as a site of nostalgia, rupture, and loss: a threshold through which one passes, leaves behind the known world, whilst also confronting the impossibility of return. The littoral here becomes a materialized threshold, or boundary across which radical change occurs. It is one where personal and political identity, human relationships, language, and collective history are explored through the experiential lens of departure and dislocation.

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/.