Osip Mandelstam Quotes

My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.

Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart, a little honey, a little sun, in obedience to Persephone's bees. You can't untie a boat that was never moored, nor hear a shadow in its furs, nor move through thick life without fear. For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive. Deep in the transparent night they're still humming, at home in the dark wood on the mountain, in the mint and lungwort and the past. But lay to your heart my rough gift, this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees that once made a sun out of honey. ― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history.

I envy everyone secretly, I secretly love everything.

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips, And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew, And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss, Acquire their forms before we do

I carry Sorrow, a grey bird, sluggish, in my chest.

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

Everything is moved by love.

I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle – in the ‘what ought to be.

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.

If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly go mad, if the paintings of all schools and masters should suddenly break loose from the nails, should fuse, intermingle, and fill the air of the rooms with futuristic howling and colours in violent agitation, the result then would be something like Dante's Comedy." Osip Mandelstam, "Converation with Dante

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.

In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. from Stone: 24 By Osip Mandelstam Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin

Я счастлив жестокой обидою, И в жизни поxожей на сон, Я каждому тайно завидую И в каждого тайно влюблен.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive.

From childhood he had been devoted to whatever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar rattle of life into events of consequence, and when he began to fall in love he tried to tell women about this, but they did not understand him, for which he revenged himself by speaking to them in a wild, bombastic birdy language and exclusively about the loftiest matters.

If our enemies take me And people stop talking to me, If they confiscate the whole world— The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go on And that people, like a judge, shall judge, And if they dare to keep me like an animal And fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony, But shall write what I am free to write, My naked body gathering momentum like a bell, And in a corner of the ominous dark I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice And move my hand in the darkness like a plough And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes, Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest, Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow, And in the depths of the unguarded night The eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shine And a flock of flaming years swoop down, And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth. But on this earth (which shall escape decay) There to wake up life and reason will be

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

I was born in the night of the second and third Of January, ninety-something-or-other, An unreliable year, and the centuries Surround me with fire.

I am wearied to death with life. There’s nothing it has that I want, but I celebrate my naked earth, there’s no other world to descant.

Life is one in all its manifestations. You must experience everything, be capable of everything, and rejoice in everything.

And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones.

One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.

The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.

a ship could be built entirely from foreign planks, but it must have its own form

The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood.

We have come to love the music of proof. Logical connection for us is not some popular song about a finch, but a choral symphony, so difficult and so inspired that the conductor must exert all his energy to keep the performers under his control.

Life is overwhelming life, Sound is melting, bit by bit, Something’s off, I feel deprived, With no time to harp on it. Life was better, was it not? No comparing, anyway, How you rustled once, my blood, - How you’re rustling today. It appears that one must pay For the movement of the lips, And the tree-tops freely sway As the axe awaits, eclipsed.

O, may my lips someday attain The primal muteness that I’ve sought - That’s like a flawless crystal note, Its purity - from birth sustained.

And like unoccupied heart’s home, You’ll fill the fragile shell, With wind, with whispers of the foam, And fog, and rain as well…

I breathed in forbidden life.

I want you now so awfully, No longer jealous-green, I bring myself as offering Up to the guillotine.

Maybe this is the beginning of madness . . . Forgive me for what I am saying. Read it . . . quietly, quietly. —OSIP MANDELSTAM

What street is this? Mandelstam Street. What a crooked name! No matter how you twist it, It doesn't come out straight. Nothing in him was stuck on right, His morals sure weren't lily white, Which is why this street Or, better yet, this slum Is called, correctly, Mandelstam.

Sleep is light in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out straight, recalls the length of the trip. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures you, bricks you up. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge...

The poet Osip Mandelstam, in a poem that goes by various names, a celebrated first-anniversary commemoration of the start of 1917, speaks of 'liberty's dim light'. The word he uses, 'sumerki', usually portends twilight, but it may also refer to the darkness before dawn. Does he honour, his translator Boris Dralyuk wonders, 'liberty's fading light, or its first faint glimmer?' Perhaps the glow at the horizon is neither of longer sunsets nor less sudden dawns, but is rather a protracted, constitutive ambiguity. Such crepuscularity we have all known, and will all know again. Such strange light is not only Russia's.

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet, our words are inaudible from ten steps away. Any conversation, however brief, gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man. His greasy fingers are thick as worms, his words weighty hammers slamming their target. His cockroach moustache seems to snicker, and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam. Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains, he toys with the favors of such homunculi. One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps; he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn. Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes, he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead, a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye. Every execution is a carnival that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.

Youth OSIP MANDELSTAM Translated by W. S. Merwin Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you I think I did not even know I was looking how would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did naked offering yourself entirely at that moment and you let me breathe you touch you taste you knowing no more than I did and only when I began to think of losing you did I recognize you when you were already part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made

Yo soy tan pobre como la naturaleza, y tan simple como el firmamento.

Είμαι τόσο φτωχός, όσο κι η φύση.

A word does not suppress This dryness spreading through, Dense air is emptiness For me without you.

Плоть опечалена, и книги надоели... Бежать... Я чувствую, как птицы опьянели От новизны небес и вспененной воды. Нет — ни в глазах моих старинные сады Не остановят сердца

О, время, завистью не мучай Того, кто вовремя застыл. Нас пеною воздвигнул случай И кружевом соединил

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

Дождик ласковый, мелкий и тонкий, Осторожный, колючий, слепой, Капли строгие скупы и звонки, И отточен их звук тишиной. То — так счастливы счастием скромным, Что упасть на стекло удалось; То, как будто подхвачены темным Ветром, струи уносятся вкось. Тайный ропот, мольба о прощеньи: Я люблю непонятный язык! И сольются в одном ощущеньи Вся жестокость, вся кротость на миг. В цепких лапах у царственной скуки Сердце сжалось, как маленький мяч: Полон музыки, Музы и муки Жизни тающей сладостный плач!

Il vento Il vento a noi consolazione portò e nell'azzurro fiutammo ali assire di libellule vibrazioni d'angolosa tenebra. E di minaccia di guerra ottenebrò lo strato inferiore dei cieli rabbuiati, bosco micaceo membranoso di corpi volanti a sei braccia Nell'azzurro c'è un angolo cieco e nei beati meriggi c'è sempre, come accenno di notti che si condensi, una tremula stella densa di fato. E a fatica aprendosi la strada nella squama delle ali storpiate, sotto la sua mano dall'alto prende l'universo sconfitto Azrail.

This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art. How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway. How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book? After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer’s courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the fi rst place. Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. Th is is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. Coming from where I come from, with the history I have—having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships of Papa Doc and his son, JeanClaude—this is what I’ve always seen as the unifying principle among all writers. This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.

Чужелюбие вообще не входит в число наших добродетелей. Народы СССР сожительствуют как школьники. Они знакомы лишь по классной парте да по большой перемене, пока крошится мел.

Quelle douleur - chercher la parole perdue, Relever ces paupières douloureuses Et, la chaux dans le sang, rassembler pour les tribus étrangères L'herbe des nuits.

The careful muffled sound of fruit That plummets, broken from a tree, Amid the constant melody Of the deep silence of the wood…

O what a threadbare life we lead, how pitifully poor the words of joy! All has been seen, all will be seen again, only the moment of recognition is sweet.

А мог бы жизнь просвистать скворцом, Заесть ореховым пирогом... Да, видно, нельзя никак

Ist die Literatur vielleicht ein Bär, der seine Pfote leckt, ein bleierner Schlaf nach getaner Pflicht, auf dem Diwan des Arbeitszimmers?

The came of the instinctive heaven Is attained through experience and sweat.

Non ho alcun preciso sentimento nei riguardi della società, di Dio e dell'uomo, però con tanta maggiore forza amo la vita, la fede e l'amore.

Каждая мысль о тебе. Каждая слеза и каждая улыбка — тебе. Я благословляю каждый день и каждый час нашей горькой жизни, мой друг, мой спутник, мой милый слепой поводырь.

За радость тихую дышать и жить Кого, скажите, мне благодарить? Sommessa gioia di esistere, respirare: per lei chi, ditemi, devo ringraziare?

A heroic era has opened in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. The state is even hungrier. But there is something hungrier yet: time.

Osip Mandelstam in the context of early twentieth-century Russia, his wife Nadezhda writes, “The poet’s mode of thought is the product of all sides of his personality: the intellectual, physiological, spiritual, and emotional, a synthesis of what he perceives through his senses, his instincts and desires, and the higher aspirations of his spirit. All these can be bound together only by some dominant idea which shapes the personality. If there is no such idea, one will have, at best, a clever craftsman, a ‘translator of ready-made ideas,’ a mechanical nightingale. The unifying idea can be located at any level of the personality—in its deep reaches or on the surface.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time, so that the deepest layer, its black earth, is on top.

One of the classical descriptions of addictions is based on the observation that addicts will continue to use even in the face of high costs. This can be quantified through the economic concept of elasticity as a measure of how much one's willingness to buy something changes by its cost. Things that diminish slowly by cost are inelastic. Researchers have suggested that drugs are fundamentally inelastic: as costs increase, the number of rewards paid for decrease less than they should. Of course, there are many things that are inelastic that are not considered addictive - oxygen, for example (where the withdrawal symptoms are particularly traumatic), but also some behaviors continued even in the face of high costs are celebrated, such as Kerri Strug's 1996 Olympic vault performed on a sprained ankle, or Osip Mandelstam continuing to write poetry even after Stalin had thrown him in the gulag for it.

I fear you will be understood only by those who wear the helpless smile of people who have lost themselves in the dark wood

কেবল বাচ্চাদের বই পড়তে হবে। কেবল বাচ্চাদের বই পড়তে হবে, কেবল শিশুদের জিনিস ভালোবাসতে হবে, বড়োদের সবকিছু ছুঁড়ে ফেলে দিতে হবে দুঃখি চেহারা নিয়ে উঠে দাঁড়াবার পর । জীবন নিয়ে আমি অবসাদে মরে যাচ্ছি এতে এমন কিছু নেই যা আমি চাই, আর কোনো সুললিত জগত নেই । কাঠের এক মামুলি দোলনা ; অন্ধকার, উঁচু দেবদারু গাছের, অনেক দূরের বাগানে, দুলছে ; যা মনে রেখেছে জ্বরে আক্রান্ত রক্ত ।

Я печаль, как птицу серую, В сердце медленно несу.

...the earth is not an encumbrance or an unfortunate accident, but a God-given palace. --OSIP MANDELSTAM

My age, my beast, who can Gaze into your pupils And with his blood cement The vertebrae of two centuries?

I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.