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Osip Mandelstam...almost...
by Bronwyn Mills
Irene Nagursky was our Professor; and in my first winter at university, we had all signed up for her course, Russian Literature in Translation. I remember waiting impatiently wondering if she would be late, only to have her burst into the classroom, stride up to the front of the room in her long coat, pull off her immense fur hat—still a bit covered with snow—and her dark, almost black hair fell down out from under the hat in limp ringlets. "Well!" she exclaimed, "shall we begin?"
I was in literary hog heaven. Of course we read Turgenev, Goncharov's Oblomov by Goncharov, The Golovylov Family by Shchedrin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time; and more. Those of us devotees who signed on for two semesters of this course, after class would rush down to a nearby luncheonette where we drank endless cups of coffee and discussed the meaning of it all—that is, all that we had read and talked about in class that day. Even what it meant to our lives, even today.
We did not read Mandelstam, who had only recently come out of the deep freeze of Stalin's censorship; but I wonder had we all been in Soviet Russia, would any of us have had to make that cruel journey to an early demise, like he did? Or surreptitiously circulate hand-typed copies of our work among trusted persons like a number of Soviet poets? Or worse—and like many—would we remain silent because we were simply too damned scared to say a word, much less write one? Perhaps would we, like the Faustian actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer, in that classic German film, Mephisto—perhaps we would substitute the adulation of the unquestioning crowd for the work of crafting something with integrity?
It is a far cry from the cold war years, I suppose; but I question the lock-step pursuit of "ratings," seeking to "brand" oneself, all those Brandauer-as-Faustian pursuits that mainstream authors so easily give in to, as if a large following was the result of artistic accomplishment rather than the puppydog pursuit of the the treacly, the "feel good," or just plain godawful.
* * * *
My friend, John Ash, now dammit, rather ill and back in Manchester, once pressed Osip Mandelstam's Noise of Time lovingly into my hands when we both were living in Istanbul: "It's my fave!" he said. With the news of John's present state, I found myself returning to that little book. In a series of posts for this page, I shall start with Mandelstam and Noise. Who knows how it will unfold? In my part of the world we are experiencing what we euphemistically call, "rainy season" and it's a bit gloomy, as close to winter as one can get. Somehow it seems a perfect time to hole up with a good book. After Mandelstam, perhaps a much fatter Russian novel?
Well, in the words of Dr. Irene Nagurski so many years ago, "shall we begin?"
The Translator, Clarence Brown
What interests me about Clarence Brown's translation of Noise of Time--out in 1965--is that, as some aver, translation can potentially lose some of its original's style. Brown could have fooled me. One believes that Noise is the essence of Mandelstam. Further, not only is the critical essay which prefaces the original 1965 edition packed with information, analysis and could well serve as a guide to many of us regarding translation but it serves to inform our own struggles to write in a world where the only source of certainty is in the unacceptably narrow grave of fanaticism.
Clarence Brown quotes Mandelstam's opening lines on Vera Komissarzheskaya in Noise: "My desire is to speak not about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal." Brown believes that Mandestam's work is "so densely imbued with his Self" that after a while the reader tends to ignore it. But what does a writer have? pen, paper, ink, once upon a time a typewriter, now a laptop, and oneself—all that one has learned, seen, felt, observed in that brief time, that "little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset" as Crowfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy characterized life on his deathbed. One may use oneself, as the spider who spins a web from itself, or one may become lost in oneself. The difference is vast.
To put it another way, Mandelstam may have used Self as a prism, but it was not his prison. To the aspiring writer in our commodified culture, it is particularly important that the useful self does not get entrapped in a persistent narcissistic gaze, like a fly which is first caught in thick resin, then ossified as it is embalmed in amber. That neither gratifies writer or reader. That is not what Mandelstam was doing.
We use ourselves; we refer to ourselves, but as Brown quotes Appollon Grigorev,
by Bronwyn Mills
Irene Nagursky was our Professor; and in my first winter at university, we had all signed up for her course, Russian Literature in Translation. I remember waiting impatiently wondering if she would be late, only to have her burst into the classroom, stride up to the front of the room in her long coat, pull off her immense fur hat—still a bit covered with snow—and her dark, almost black hair fell down out from under the hat in limp ringlets. "Well!" she exclaimed, "shall we begin?"
I was in literary hog heaven. Of course we read Turgenev, Goncharov's Oblomov by Goncharov, The Golovylov Family by Shchedrin, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time; and more. Those of us devotees who signed on for two semesters of this course, after class would rush down to a nearby luncheonette where we drank endless cups of coffee and discussed the meaning of it all—that is, all that we had read and talked about in class that day. Even what it meant to our lives, even today.
We did not read Mandelstam, who had only recently come out of the deep freeze of Stalin's censorship; but I wonder had we all been in Soviet Russia, would any of us have had to make that cruel journey to an early demise, like he did? Or surreptitiously circulate hand-typed copies of our work among trusted persons like a number of Soviet poets? Or worse—and like many—would we remain silent because we were simply too damned scared to say a word, much less write one? Perhaps would we, like the Faustian actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer, in that classic German film, Mephisto—perhaps we would substitute the adulation of the unquestioning crowd for the work of crafting something with integrity?
It is a far cry from the cold war years, I suppose; but I question the lock-step pursuit of "ratings," seeking to "brand" oneself, all those Brandauer-as-Faustian pursuits that mainstream authors so easily give in to, as if a large following was the result of artistic accomplishment rather than the puppydog pursuit of the the treacly, the "feel good," or just plain godawful.
* * * *
My friend, John Ash, now dammit, rather ill and back in Manchester, once pressed Osip Mandelstam's Noise of Time lovingly into my hands when we both were living in Istanbul: "It's my fave!" he said. With the news of John's present state, I found myself returning to that little book. In a series of posts for this page, I shall start with Mandelstam and Noise. Who knows how it will unfold? In my part of the world we are experiencing what we euphemistically call, "rainy season" and it's a bit gloomy, as close to winter as one can get. Somehow it seems a perfect time to hole up with a good book. After Mandelstam, perhaps a much fatter Russian novel?
Well, in the words of Dr. Irene Nagurski so many years ago, "shall we begin?"
The Translator, Clarence Brown
What interests me about Clarence Brown's translation of Noise of Time--out in 1965--is that, as some aver, translation can potentially lose some of its original's style. Brown could have fooled me. One believes that Noise is the essence of Mandelstam. Further, not only is the critical essay which prefaces the original 1965 edition packed with information, analysis and could well serve as a guide to many of us regarding translation but it serves to inform our own struggles to write in a world where the only source of certainty is in the unacceptably narrow grave of fanaticism.
Clarence Brown quotes Mandelstam's opening lines on Vera Komissarzheskaya in Noise: "My desire is to speak not about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal." Brown believes that Mandestam's work is "so densely imbued with his Self" that after a while the reader tends to ignore it. But what does a writer have? pen, paper, ink, once upon a time a typewriter, now a laptop, and oneself—all that one has learned, seen, felt, observed in that brief time, that "little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset" as Crowfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy characterized life on his deathbed. One may use oneself, as the spider who spins a web from itself, or one may become lost in oneself. The difference is vast.
To put it another way, Mandelstam may have used Self as a prism, but it was not his prison. To the aspiring writer in our commodified culture, it is particularly important that the useful self does not get entrapped in a persistent narcissistic gaze, like a fly which is first caught in thick resin, then ossified as it is embalmed in amber. That neither gratifies writer or reader. That is not what Mandelstam was doing.
We use ourselves; we refer to ourselves, but as Brown quotes Appollon Grigorev,
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I intend to write a history of my impressions rather than an autobiography; I choose myself as an object, as a complete stranger, I look upon myself as as a son of a particular era...whatever concerns me personally will be included only insofar as it characterizes the era.
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If anything should serve as a caution to those of us who write, especially to those who are considering a "memoir," so popular in this loneliest of eras, it is that statement. Were we to heed Grigorev's message, the apparent— appalling—lack of context, especially of political context, in much of what passes for fiction in our culture might be avoided. For Mandelstam, if we are to believe Brown, and for many subsequent Russian writers, Grigorev's My Literary and Moral Wanderings provided a standard for all to follow.
Both Grigorev and Mandelstam's memoirs--the former's set in a grimy quarter on the unfashionable edge of Moscow, the latter's in the Jewish Quarter of St.Petersburg, the Kolomna, and both disdained by Baedecker's guides of the day--these instinctively attend to and evoke place. Further, Mandelstam lavishes his work, as Brown's essay points out, with markers of the literary culture in which he was immersed, not for commerce, but for its literary and cultural value.
I have culled from Brown's essay some of the things that are important for writers to pay close attention to. I want to add, however, some thoughts about Mandelstam's techniques as a writer.
Hang on.
Both Grigorev and Mandelstam's memoirs--the former's set in a grimy quarter on the unfashionable edge of Moscow, the latter's in the Jewish Quarter of St.Petersburg, the Kolomna, and both disdained by Baedecker's guides of the day--these instinctively attend to and evoke place. Further, Mandelstam lavishes his work, as Brown's essay points out, with markers of the literary culture in which he was immersed, not for commerce, but for its literary and cultural value.
I have culled from Brown's essay some of the things that are important for writers to pay close attention to. I want to add, however, some thoughts about Mandelstam's techniques as a writer.
Hang on.
Archival photo reproduction of A. Zavadsky’s Jewish Orchestra of Ballroom Music, Poltava Province, 1901. (Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg, Russia)
Mandelstam, Part 2: Language and Chaos
Consider this: perhaps you have had the experience of walking a route you had previously sped through in your car; suddenly you see the landmarks, the gnarled tree and, in summer, the audacious sunflowers nodding over the fence of an old lady's garden, the creaking gate of a neighbor's neighbor, a patch of wild tiger lilies near the
corner, the smell of honeysuckle run rampant in the ditch that borders the railway
tracks. We, too, hope for the details we have missed in our haste...
Perhaps reading good literature is a little like taking that walk with the writer as your guide--"look! look at that!' "Notice this: have you ever wondered how that might have happened?" "Smell this!" "See the man with dirt under his fingernails..." As readers it behooves us to pay attention; as writers, we must.
Consider this: perhaps you have had the experience of walking a route you had previously sped through in your car; suddenly you see the landmarks, the gnarled tree and, in summer, the audacious sunflowers nodding over the fence of an old lady's garden, the creaking gate of a neighbor's neighbor, a patch of wild tiger lilies near the
corner, the smell of honeysuckle run rampant in the ditch that borders the railway
tracks. We, too, hope for the details we have missed in our haste...
Perhaps reading good literature is a little like taking that walk with the writer as your guide--"look! look at that!' "Notice this: have you ever wondered how that might have happened?" "Smell this!" "See the man with dirt under his fingernails..." As readers it behooves us to pay attention; as writers, we must.
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There once arrived at our house a person completely unknown to us, an unmarried lady of about forty....she demanded we find her a husband in Petersburg. She spent a week in the house before we managed to send her packing. From time to time wandering authors would turn up--bearded and long-skirted people, Talmudic philosophers, peddlers of their own printed aphorisms and dicta....
Once or twice in my life I was taken to a synagogue as if to a concert. There was a long wait to get in--one practically had to buy tickets from scalpers--and all that I saw and heard there caused me to return home in a heavy stupor. |
The italics for the phrase, "as if to a concert," are mine; the quote is from "Judaic Chaos," a section in Mandelstam's Noise of Time (the title piece) in the book of the same name.. A member of St. Petersburg's Jewish intelligentsia, Mandelstam, we gather, was not particularly involved in Judaism (the religion) ; nor, like Isaac Babel, did he focus solely upon Russian Jews, or on Jewish folk tales and Judaism, as grist for either his poetry or his prose. (I have read sources that claim that he became more involved in his Jewishness, if one can put it that way, as he grew older.) Be that as it may, when he does turn to his memories of life amidst Russian Jewry, I am reminded of Pablo Neruda's phrase, "a poetry stained with soup and shame." Neruda explained this poetry—he called it an "impure poetry"—in terms of objects which resonate with "the confused impurity of the human condition": our smell, our worn clothing, our silliness, our yearnings, the dignity of our labor:
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In the backyards, Latvians dry and cure flounder, a one-eyed, bony fish, flat as a broad palm. The wailing of children, piano scales, the groans of patients from the innumerable dentists' offices, the clatter of crockery in the little resort pensions, the roulades of singers and the shouts of the peddlars —these noises are never silenced in the labyrinth of kitchen gardens, bakeries and barbed wire, and as far as the eye can see along the sand embankment run little toy trains, shone with rails and filled to overflowing with "hares"[1] who leap about during the trip from prim German Bilderlingshof to congested Jewish Dubbeln, which smelled of swaddling clothes. Wandering musicians strolled about among the sparse pine groves: two convoluted trumpets, a clarinet, and a trombone. Forever being chased away, they blow out their mercilessly false brassnote and now here, now there, strike up the equestrian march of the splendid Karolina.
The whole region was controlled by a monocled baron named Firks. He divided his land into two parts: that which had been cleansed of Jews and that which had not. In the clean half, German students sat scraping their beer steins about on small tables. In the Jewish section babies' diapers hung from lines, and piano scales would gasp for breath. In the Germans' Mayorenhof there were concerts: Strauss' Death and Transfiguration played by a symphony orchestra in the shell in the park. Elderly German women, their cheeks glowing and their mourning freshly donned, found it consoling. In Jewish Dubbeln the orchestra strained at Tchaikovsky's Symphonie Pathétique, and one could hear the two nests of strings calling back and forth to each other. |
I also quoted Neruda's phrase for his respect of the unnoticed, the worn, the frayed in the frenetic search for dignity on the part of the denigrated in a strained, intolerant world because Mandelstam does not necessarily write about the glories of the proletariat: he is there, a witness, he reflects what goes on around him in redolent language. Anti-Semitism was alive and well, poverty, human cruelty and human clumsiness; and though his metaphors were gloriously crafted, he did not tart up what he saw.
Mandelstam was also a modernist, and fond of high culture. Not a member of the privileged class, nevertheless he did not say much about the common man. He was both enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution and, like many intellectuals, bitterly disappointed in its failure to live up to its promise. He was not a propagandist:
Mandelstam was also a modernist, and fond of high culture. Not a member of the privileged class, nevertheless he did not say much about the common man. He was both enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution and, like many intellectuals, bitterly disappointed in its failure to live up to its promise. He was not a propagandist:
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The year 1905 was the chimera of the Russian Revolution with the little lynx eyes of a policeman and wearing a student's blue beret, flat as a pancake! The Petersburgers could sense your coming from a great distance, they could catch the sound of your horses' hooves, and they shivered in your drafts in the alcohol-preserved auditoriums of the Military Medical College or in the immense long jeu de paume of the Menshikov University, where the future orator of the Armenians would roar like an enraged lion at some feeble SR or SD,[2] and whose job it was to listen would stretch out their avine necks. Memory loves to go hunting in the dark, and it was in the densest possible murk that you were born [presumably M. is addressing the "Sergey Ivanych" of the title.] O moment, when— one, two, three— the Nevsky blinked its long electric lashes to bury itself in the blackness of outer night and from the far end of the boulevard there appeared out of the dense shaggy dark the chimera with its little lynx policeman eyes and flattened student's cap.
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Somewhere in the dark, my memory pounces on a vision of my last high school English teacher, a rotund and fastidious little man with a giant great Dane—we heard—named Tigger. This horrid little man—for he was—this fussy little man would stand at the head of the class and make us write stripped-down prose (I wanted to write "Run, Spot, run," but I didn't.) He inveighed against the "pathetic fallacy" and "personification." Had he read Mandelstam, I am sure he would have hated him. For that matter, all those dramatic Russian writers...
Mandelstam gives us whole chunks of vivid description that exuberantly exceeded almost every stricture that distant instructor attempted to impose. While some men are "books, others—newspapers," Sergey is described as among those who are "interlinear translations." Indeed, come the Revolution and Sergey disappeared, "like a chimera he dissolved at the first light of the historic day." Someone, I suggest, who writes like that, insightful and startling in his imagery, that someone is not going to please the plodding ideologues of the day; for, as far as I can see, fanatics detest the metaphorical, loathe the lyrical, and—worst of all—ain't got no sensauma.
Imagery, though, is not just a silent movie. In "The Erfurt Program" (we are still in Noise of Time) M. makes mention of "a dim memory of Konevskoy, who had recently drowned in a river. That was a young man who had reached maturity too early and was thus not read by Russian youth: his lines had a difficult sound like the rustling of the roots of a forest." Now, I am not sure what that sound is precisely, but, at the risk of sounding sappy, I can sense it. Indeed, as the deaf "hear "music via vibration, I feel as though I hear it; and I am reminded that poetry, especially poetry as story, began with a plucked string, perhaps some percussive sound, an altered voice, a song. Epics, whether those of the Greeks or the Ozidi Cycle of the Niger Delta, the tales of the aşıks in what is now Turkey, many more, are not tone deaf, though each language has its distinctive music and its particular drama.
I am not concerned with literary criticism here; rather—and inspired by Mandelstam's little book—I want to emphasize the importance of paying attention to the words and phrases and metaphors one uses in one's work, language not only for poets, not as the overly polished and bland material coming of writing programs that reads something like a script for Radio Free America, not frivolous decoration, but language emerging from a deep connection with one's mother tongue. Oh, well, Mandelstam is primarily a poet, I have heard fellow writers say. No, we as writers of prose or poetry need to pay more attention, as he did, to our language. But the Mandelstam that we read is in translation. Yes; I suppose the translator should really be a magician, and a creative writer him- or herself; for the original needs to be honored intellectually and artistically BUT the translation needs to approximate the same integrity. In our own tongue, Latinate language, in English, often lands on the page with a deadening, clinical thunk. The influence of old French sometimes makes wussy participles out of perfectly good assertive verbs. The resonance and simplicity of Anglo Saxon, alliterative and rhyme poor, oddly stirs us:
Mandelstam gives us whole chunks of vivid description that exuberantly exceeded almost every stricture that distant instructor attempted to impose. While some men are "books, others—newspapers," Sergey is described as among those who are "interlinear translations." Indeed, come the Revolution and Sergey disappeared, "like a chimera he dissolved at the first light of the historic day." Someone, I suggest, who writes like that, insightful and startling in his imagery, that someone is not going to please the plodding ideologues of the day; for, as far as I can see, fanatics detest the metaphorical, loathe the lyrical, and—worst of all—ain't got no sensauma.
Imagery, though, is not just a silent movie. In "The Erfurt Program" (we are still in Noise of Time) M. makes mention of "a dim memory of Konevskoy, who had recently drowned in a river. That was a young man who had reached maturity too early and was thus not read by Russian youth: his lines had a difficult sound like the rustling of the roots of a forest." Now, I am not sure what that sound is precisely, but, at the risk of sounding sappy, I can sense it. Indeed, as the deaf "hear "music via vibration, I feel as though I hear it; and I am reminded that poetry, especially poetry as story, began with a plucked string, perhaps some percussive sound, an altered voice, a song. Epics, whether those of the Greeks or the Ozidi Cycle of the Niger Delta, the tales of the aşıks in what is now Turkey, many more, are not tone deaf, though each language has its distinctive music and its particular drama.
I am not concerned with literary criticism here; rather—and inspired by Mandelstam's little book—I want to emphasize the importance of paying attention to the words and phrases and metaphors one uses in one's work, language not only for poets, not as the overly polished and bland material coming of writing programs that reads something like a script for Radio Free America, not frivolous decoration, but language emerging from a deep connection with one's mother tongue. Oh, well, Mandelstam is primarily a poet, I have heard fellow writers say. No, we as writers of prose or poetry need to pay more attention, as he did, to our language. But the Mandelstam that we read is in translation. Yes; I suppose the translator should really be a magician, and a creative writer him- or herself; for the original needs to be honored intellectually and artistically BUT the translation needs to approximate the same integrity. In our own tongue, Latinate language, in English, often lands on the page with a deadening, clinical thunk. The influence of old French sometimes makes wussy participles out of perfectly good assertive verbs. The resonance and simplicity of Anglo Saxon, alliterative and rhyme poor, oddly stirs us:
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The men of my tribe would treat him as game
if he comes to the camp the will kill him outright. Our fate is forked.[3] |
When I refer to the Anglo Saxon, I am not referring to the adolescent sprinkling of one's mss. with the f-word, for lack of sufficient vocabulary to express strong feeling well. (I used to startle my students by saying their language should be as precise as an assassin's bullet.) I am not saying we should all beat SVO construction to death as do Hemingway's imitators. A friend of long ago once lent me a novel set in post-apocalyptic England: the language had degenerated to near-inarticulateness, and the author attempts to write in this degraded tongue; alas, I lent it to someone who has never returned it, and I can't remember the title to save me. However, what is interesting is the experiment, I do not think honing our skills to mimic the grunts of a dying society is the only choice writers can make. Perhaps part of the answer lies in Spanish writer Antonio Machado 's comment, put in the mouth of a "profesor apócrifio"—an apocryphal professor (mind, Machado also wrote in turbulent times--the Spanish Civil War):
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Hemos de vivir en un mundo sustenado por unas cuantas palabras, y si las destruimos, tendremos que sustituirlas por otras. Ellas son los verdaderos atlas del mundo; si una de ellas nos falta antes de tiempo nuestro universo se arruina.
We must live in a world sustained by a certain number of words, and if we destroy them, we must substitute others for them. They are the true atlas of the world; should one of them fail us before its time, our universe will fall into ruin. —Antonio Machado, de Juan de Mairena. Sentencias, donaires, apuntes y recuerdos de un profesor apócrifio. 1934-1936. |
[1] Illegal immigrants who leap off and bounded away, reminding observers of rabbits.
[2] Socialist Revolutionary Party or Social Democratic (Brown notes the real, full name was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which split into the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks in 1903.)
[3] From "Wulf & Eadwacer," in The Earliest English Poems. Trans. Michael Alexander.
