Review: Three of Them

Reviewed Work(s): Hope against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam and Max Hayward; Hope
Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam and Max Hayward; Mandelstam by Clarence Brown;
Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam, Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin;
Poems of Akhmatova by Akhmatova, Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward; Marina
Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva and Elaine Feinstein
Review by: Michael Mesic
Source: Poetry, Vol. 124, No. 4 (Jul., 1974), pp. 232-242
Published by: Poetry Foundation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20596524
Accessed: 16-01-2020 02:02 UTC

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POETRY

COMMENT

THREE OF THEM

Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Tr. by Max Hayward.

Atheneum. $io.oo.
Hope Abandoned, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Tr. by Max Hayward.
Atheneum. $I3.95.
Mandelstam, by Clarence Brown. Princeton University Press. $I3.95.
Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems. Tr. by Clarence Brown and W. S.
Merwin. Atheneum. $6.25.
Poems of Akhmatova. Tr. by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Atlantic
Monthly Press/Little, Brown. $7.95 clothbound; $3.95 paperbound.
Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems. Tr. by Elaine Feinstein. Oxford
University Press. $8.oo.

Most reviewers of Nadezhda Mandelstam's excellent memoirs, Hope

Aoainst Hope and Hope Abandoned, have found it undesirable or un
important to quote passages from them, and while it is true that the
quotation of snippets out of the broad, conversational context of the
books would serve little purpose in explaining their value, one selection,
because it gives us a view of him at work, may help the English reader
understand a little what Osip Mandelstam's poetry requires of a trans
lator.

As many poets have said-Akhmatova. . . and M. among them

a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing insistently in the ears;
at first inchoate, it later takes on a precise form, though still without
words. I sometimes saw M. trying to get rid of this kind of "hum,"
to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though
it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear
while bathing. But it was always louder than any noise, radio or
conversation in the same room.
Akhmatova told me that when Poem Without a Hero came to her,
she was ready to try anything just to get rid of it, even rushing to
do her washing. But nothing helped. At some point words formed
behind the musical phrase and then the lips began to move. The
work of a poet has probably something in common with that of a
composer, and the appearance of words is the crucial factor that
distinguishes it from musical composition. The "hum" sometimes
came to M. in his sleep, but he could never remember it on waking.
I have a feeling that verse exists before it is composed (M. never
talked of "writing" verse, only of "composing" it and then copying

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 MICHAEL MESIC

it out). The whole process of composition is one of strainin

catch and record something compounded of harmony and sen
it is relayed from an unknown source and gradually forms
into words. The last stage of work consists in ridding the poe
all the words foreign to the harmonious whole which existed b
the poem arose. Such words slip in by chance, being used to
gaps during the emergence of the whole. They become lodg
the body of the poem, and removing them is hard work. This
stage is a painful process of listening in to oneself in a search fo
objective and absolutely precise unity called a "poem." In his
Save My Speech, the last adjective to come was "painstaking
"the painstaking tar of hard work"). M. complained that he n
something more precise and spare here, in the manner of Ak
tova: "She knows how to do it." He seemed to be waiting fo
help.
I noticed that in his work on a poem there were two points at
which he would sigh with relief-when the first words in a line or
stanza came to him, and when the last of the foreign bodies was
driven out by the right word. Only then is there an end to the
process of listening in to oneself-the same process that can prepare
the way for a disturbance of the inner hearing and loss of sanity.
The poem now seems to fall away from the author and no longer
torments him with its resonance. He is released from the thing
that obsesses him. lo, poor cow, escapes from the gadfly.
If the poem won't "go away," M. said, it means that there is
something wrong with it, or something "still hidden in it"-a last
fruitful bud from which a new shoot might sprout. In other words,
the work is not finished. Whenever M.'s "inner voice" ceased, he
was always very eager to read the new poem to someone. I wasn't
enough for this: I witnessed his throes at such close quarters that
M. always thought I must also be able to hear the "hum." He even
reproached me sometimes for not having caught part of it. ... The
first reading rounds off, as it were, the process of working on a poem,
and the first listener is felt to be a contributor to it.

If poems come into being as Mme. Mandelstam describes, and I

think most poets will agree that they do at least some of the time, then
the poet, the scholar, and the translator each performs a similar function
and has 'an equal duty. The poet, hearing the poem as a harmonious
whole, at first records as much of it as he can, and later purifies it of any
words foreign to its unity. The scholar too begins with a received text
and must choose from variant readings the ones he thinks closest to the
spirit of the poem. The translator has a more difficult task, for he hears
the poem in one language but must reproduce it in another, preserving
the original's harmony and unity without allowing too many of his
own interpolations to infiltrate the poem and alter it beyond recognition.

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POETRY

Clarence Brown, whose critical book, Mandelstam, is an example of

humble, sympathetic, and faithful scholarship, should not have allowed
himself to be harnessed with W. S. Merwin in the task of bringing
Mandelstam's poems into English. Brown is the acknowledged authorit
on Mandelstam in this country and has spent nearly twenty years
studying the man and his works. His own translation of Mandelstam'
major prose works, also published by Princeton University Press, i
readable, though it occasionally makes the style denser than it actually
is. The first third of Matidelstam gives us a brief biography, but the rest
of the book, more interesting by far, contains some close examinations
of particular poems, all from the earlier period of Mandelstam's work.
The translations follow immediately upon the Russian texts, and if the
are not particularly inspired versions, Brown does not claim that they
stand by themselves as English poems. The notes to the poems do giv
us a sense of the originals, their music and subtlety; and it is clear from
the tone and content of his comments that Clarence Brown has not
merely made a career out of Mandelstam's work, but regards it with
deep respect and affection
It is even sadder then, while Brown seems to disclaim some responsi
bility, that he was a party at all to W. S. Merwin's Osip Mandelstam:
Selected Poems. "Against what may prove to have been my better
judgment", he explains "not so much the voice that was there to be
altered, nor yet its altered form, but the process of alteration itself."
Since his function had for the most part been carried out during hi
years of attention to Mandelstam's poems, when he prepared work
sheets on each of them, it would seem appropriate that he have second
thoughts about, as well as "An Afterthought on the Translation",
where he halfheartedly justifies Merwin's deviations from the work
sheets by citing an example of Mandelstam's own less than literal transl
tion of four of Petrarch's sonnets. But the cases are not the same. Mandel
stam was not translating all of Petrarch and planting his own voice in
the body of Petrarch's work. His limited and private exercises could
not have created as mistaken an impression of Petrarch's poetry for
Russian readers as Merwin's translations will for us. Not only would
the original Italian be more accessible to Russians than Russian is to
Americans, but other versions of Petrarch were available to them; w
have, at present, only Merwin's Mandelstam or even worse ones.
Brown also invokes Robert Lowell and Vladimir Nabokov to
justify the fact that "Merwin has translated Mandelstam into Merwin."
Leaving aside Nabokov, whose stylistic peculiarities are outside the
scope of this article, Robert Lowell's practices are hardly the solid rock
upon which to build a theory of translation. While Lowell's translation
are admired by his admirers, they are otherwise seldom considered mor
than travesties of their originals. Merwin's version of Mandelstam will
doubtless please his own large following as well, but it makes even
Lowell's imitations seem works of high quality. It is hardly what Brown

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 MICHAEL MESIC

in an unfortunate attack of enthusiasm, calls "the happiest of situation

that Mandelstam's tightly-controlled, metrical lines appear in thi
formal, slovenly disguise.
It is easy to see why Merwin wanted to translate Mandelstam:
memoirs had created an interest in the man (perhaps a market for
poetry?) and Merwin must have discerned what seemed to him s
similarity between his own work and Mandelstam's. The obviou
similarity, and I am not sure there is any other, is a superficial
Mandelstam's fondness for certain key words like "stone", "sun
"silence", and "black", among others; words which meant somethi
but perhaps not always something definite. Merwin's stock comp
is full of similar characters, and while we can understand his impu
to claim Mandelstam as an ancestor, I cannot understand why Br
allowed the crimes of this son to be visited on the father. Mandelst
deserves better treatment and Brown, at least, has a duty to see that
receives it.
One of Mandelstam's earliest poems (No. 3 in the New York edition
of his works) indicates the sort of liberties Merwin and Brown were
willing to take with the original.

H13 ROJIyTeMHORI 3aJIbI, BApyr,

TbI BbICICOJIb3HyJIa B JIericoft uiain
MbI HHKOMY tie HoMeInaJIH,
MS He 6yHaJIH CaIgHiX cayr . . .

Brown's working version reads:

From the half-darkened hall, suddenly

You slipped out in your light shawl
We did not bother anyone,
We did not wake the sleeping servants ...

This is a simple, straight-forward quatrain with little need, it seems, for

changes, and yet Merwin renders the four lines as:

All the lamps were turned low.

You slipped out quickly in a thin shawl.
We disturbed no one.
The servants went on sleeping.

If these liberties were taken for some purpose-to produce a metrical

version or one with rhymes like the original-we should be more
willing to excuse the practice for the result. Verse translation from
formal originals must move between the poles of sound and sense to be
at all successful; and whenever one is emphasized, the other seems to
suffer, except in those rare cases when a translator has found (often by

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POETRY

linguistic accident) perfect equivalents for the original phrases. Merw

has not bothered with either sound or sense; both suffer because bot
were disregarded, which is inexcusable, a waste of our time as well as h
To indicate what might be made from Mandelstam's admitte
difficult lines, I offer another poem (No. 78) in the original, Brow
worksheet, the Merwinization, and in my own version.

BeccOHHLUga. FoMep. Tyrne niapyca.

I CrnHCOR icopa6aef iiipo'eji qo cepeAHHbI:
Ceft AJIHHHbIff BhIBOA0JK, cexi noesg mypaBJIHHbI1i,
1JTO Hag 39iziiaoio norIga-To H0)HHJICH.

Rai- 2HypaBJIHHbIHI HJIHH B qyaMce py6emnH

Ha roaiosax gapeR 6o0HeCTseHHan HieHa
Ryra IHamIBeTe BbI? Horo a 6b1 He EKeHa,
1qTO Tpon BaM OAHa, axefc~ne MymH?

H Mope, H POMep-BCe ABHeTCH Juo60Bbso.

Roro me CJIYIIIaTb MHe? H BOT roMep MOJIqHT,
H Mope 'IepHoe, BHTHHiCTBVy, II1YMHT
H4 C THMI-HM rpOXOTOM IIOAXOAHT K H3rOJIOBbo.

Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails.

I've read up to the middle of the catalogue of ships,
that long litter, that train of cranes,
that once set forth above Hellas.

Where are you sailing like a wedge of cranes

into alien zones, a godly foam
on your leaders' heads? Helen gone, Achaian men,
what would Troy alone be worth to you?

The sea and Homer both-all moves by force of love.

Whom should I listen to? Even Homer's silent now,
and now the dark sea roars rhetorically
its billowy thunder above my pillowed head.

(tr. by Brown)

Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails.

I've read to the middle of the list of ships:
the strung-out flock, the stream of cranes
that once rose above Hellas.

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 MICHAEL MESIC

Flight of cranes crossing strange borders,

leaders drenched with the foam of the gods,
where are you sailing? What would Troy be to you,
men of Achaea, without Helen?

The sea-Homer-it's all moved by love. But to whom

shall I listen? No sound now from Homer,
and the black sea roars like a speech
and thunders up the bed.

(tr. byMerwin)

Sleeplessness. The Iliad. Sails taut.

Half the catalogue of ships remains
Unread: this lengthy brood, this fleet of cranes
That once, above the shores of Greece, set out.

Like a flock of birds toward a land unknown

Your leaders in a sweat-Achaian men,
Where are you sailing? Had there never been
A Helen, what would Troy be worth alone?

The sea and Homer-love turns every head.

To whom shall I listen? Homer here keeps silent,
And now the dark sea roars, and violent
With heavy thunder, breaks above the bed.

The central event in Mme. Mandelstam's memoirs is her husband's

first arrest, in I934. This scene and its immediate aftermath, imprison
ment and grueling interrogation, form the beginning of Hope Againls
Hope, which then follows events in roughly chronological sequenc
with occasional, illuminating flashbacks-until Mandelstam's second
arrest, in I938, and his death in a forced labor camp, about which ther
is still very little reliable information. The period between these tw
arrests was tremendously difficult (the Mandelstams lived in provinci
exile, without money or employment), but it was also poetically pr
ductive, especially at the end of their stay in Voronezh, when Mandelstam
composed some of his best poems.
A sensitive, intellectual, and shy man, Mandelstam was a product o
his bourgeois, Jewish childhood. His early literary success succumbe
to the official violence of the Stalinist purges. An inner emigre and not a
political writer, he lived in his own imagination much of the time. Hi
poetry seldom confronts the social situation head-on, but repeatedl
returns to the subject of the weak and the strong, the powerful and th

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POETRY

powerless. Though he was politically impotent, Mandelstam possess

the moral strength to live out the fate that seemed marked down for
him even before he wrote the poem about Stalin which the authoritie
used as an excuse to destroy him.
We glimpse Mandelstam's biography through the screen of his wife
recollections: a screen not without its opaqueness at points; yet t
vividness of her memory and the depth in which she analyses Mand
stam's past, and her own, and the horror of their time in jeopardy
convince us of her truthfulness and her interest that the importan
events be explained. She presents Mandelstam, the poet and the man,
he was, functioning under the stress of arrest, exile, and terror. In th
second book, Hope Abandoned, she does not have as clearly-defined
story to tell and seems equally interested in settling scores. Those scen
or anecdotes about which other memoirists have gossiped (Russian
intellectuals and writers are the world's most contradictory gossips, o
so it sometimes seems), Nadezhda Yakovlevna sets right with righteou
anger. But her occasional petulance is insignificant compared to he
courage. Since the situation in the Soviet Union is not very different,
but terribly similar to what it was in the 'Twenties and 'Thirties, it is
only Mine. Mandelstam's own care and luck that have preserv
Mandelstam's work as her skill as a writer has recaptured that earlie
period and made a place in it for her husband. With her memoirs befo
us, we recognize Osip Mandelstam's greatness. We may hope agains
hope to have, someday, acceptable versions of his poems.
Anna Akhmatova has fared far better than Mandelstam. Poems of
Akhmatova is, in fact, so superior to Merwin's effort, that we might b
tempted to consider the Kunitz-Hayward translations unsurpassabl
They are excellent, better than one ever expected them to be, con
scientiously respectful of the original and aware of the demands o
English. We should, however, accept and appreciate these versions n
only as some of the best presently available, but as guides to bette
Stanley Kunitz's note on the translations makes sensible claims for th
and his understanding of the translator's task and dilemma is well and
briefly stated. He believes in both scholarly restraint and creative int
tion, and the results eloquently prove the efficacy of the combination
Kuntiz has made the effort that Merwin was incapable of. Rhymes a
not invariably reproduced, but there are enough of them to make u
hear something of the original music. These renderings go beyon
regularity, to capture the intricacy and subtlety of Akhmatova's lines
Kunitz and Hayward, unlike Merwin and Brown, were willing to hav
their versions presented beside the originals, to be compared line b
line. The practice of printing facing texts is all the more important when
the original meter and rhyme-scheme is not suggested in the translation,
so even those who have little knowledge of the language may see
something of the poems' intended structure.

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 MICHAEL MESIC

The readers of Poetry have seen four of these poems already, bu

should gladly quote many others were there space enough to do
Here, at least, is one example:

THERE ARE FOUR OF US

Herewith I solemnly renounce my hoard

of earthly goods, whatever counts as chattel.
The genius and guardian angel of this place
has changed to an old tree-stump in the water.

Earth takes us in awhile as transient guests;

we live by habit, which we must unlearn.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friends, two voices, talking in their turn.

Did I say two? . . . There by the eastern wall,

where criss-cross shoots of brambles trail,
-O look !-that fresh dark elderberry branch
is like a letter from Marina in the mail.

Max Hayward's introduction is an excellent biographical sketc

Anna Akhmatova, whom many consider Mandelstam's poetic eq
and some, even his superior. Certainly, with the other three of
poem-Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, and Pasternak-Akhmatova occup
a pre-eminent place in twentieth-century Russian letters. Her life w
some ways one of greater suffering than Mandelstam's; in any case
suffering was more extended. She was a survivor, and if survivors
Akhmatova were allowed to live, they were seldom allowed the p
to enjoy the privilege. Akhmatova herself was not imprisoned or sen
a labor camp, but her son, Lev Gumilev, suffered imprisonment
forced labor almost continuously from I93 5 until the "thaw" of the
'Fifties. Her husband, Nikolai Gumilev had been shot, and later
lover, Nikolai Punin, was also arrested. Almost all of her intim
friends and her relations met tragic ends, and yet she was not in
dated; her fate was that she live on without them. She used the time
was granted to good advantage, and though her early poetry, wit
sensitive understanding of the relationships in which she felt he
entangled, the beauty and despair of love, would in any case h
assured her a prominent place in the history of Russian poetry, her
rests solidly on her later work, particularly the longer poems Requ
and Poem Without a Hero.
Akhmatova's long, lonely life should serve as an example to th
who, in self-pitying moments, wonder how they will be able to g
living, working; for though she could write in Poem Without a H

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POETRY

Absurd, absurd, absurd! From such absurdity

I shall soon turn gray
or change into another person.
Why do you beckon me with your hand?

For one moment of peace

I wvould give the peace of the tomb.

she also cherished her past, the friendships, and even perhaps the des
that were her lot, and in Lot's Wife asks:

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Near the end of her life, Akhmatova was restored to membersh

the Union of Writers, was published again for the first time in m
years, and was allowed to travel to the West on two occasions-
receive the Etna-Taormina prize in Italy and an honorary degree
Oxford University. She died in i966, but she had accomplished
task she had understood to be hers and her colleagues'.

We know what trembles on the scales,

and what we must steel ourselves to face.
The bravest hour strikes on our clocks:
may courage not abandon us!
Let bullets kill us-we are not afraid,
nor are we bitter, though our housetops fall.
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
from servitude in foreign chains,
keep you alive, great Russian word,
fit for the songs of our children's children,
pure on their tongues, and free.

Marina Tsvetayeva was an intense, romantic woman and a powe

poet, neither a survivor nor a victim of the Soviet regime, but a v
of the times and her own unshakeable independence. More act
hostile to the Bolshevik revolution than either of her fellow poets
sided with the White Army and went into exile after the Civil W
While she wrote her greatest poetry in Prague and Paris, her estr
ment from the Russian community abroad and her husband's retur
the Soviet Union finally forced her return as well. Even then sh
not feel at home, as she had predicted in an earlier poem:

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 MICHAEL MESIC

Homesickness! that long

exposed weariness!
It's all the same to me now
where I am altogether lonely

And I won't be seduced by the thought of

my native language, its milky call.
How can it matter in what tongue I
am misunderstood by whoever I meet.

For two years Tsvetayeva struggled to maintain herself, main

poorly-paid jobs as a translator. Her husband had been killed b
government in payment for his secret sympathy and service abroa
her daughter and sister had both been sent to prison camps. Ther
never be reliable information about the circumstances of her
she hanged herself-but like Mayakovsky, whom she eulogized
cycle of poems, her own intensity in support of a cause, in love, a
despair seems to have consumed her. We are lucky to have her re
of these consuming intensities, and we can also be grateful for
Feinstein's translations which do justice to the originals.
Ms. Feinstein preserves the power, imagery, and sense of the po
though she seldom attempts to reproduce much of their musi
substitution of spaces for dashes is more distracting, not only be
spaces in the middle of lines have unfortunate free-verse connota
(Tsvetayeva's poems are formally tighter than some of Akhma
later work), but because Ms. Feinstein seems determined to split a
from nouns and subjects from copula verbs. In Russian, of course
"the", and "is" have to be understood, and "is", in fact, can oft
represented by a dash. But these and similar problems of punct
are less important than Elaine Feinstein's success in capturing Tsvetay
tone of voice and the urgency and passion of her utterance. The
of the Motuntain and The Poem of the End, as complete translations o
cycles, are particularly successful, since Tsvetayeva's use of re
phrases and lines is best appreciated when we can see all the varia
of context and feel the building tension of repetition. But even in
shorter poems, Tsvetayeva's voice rings clear and emphatic in
passionate versions, as in section 3 of The Poet.

Now what shall I do here, blind and fatherless?

Everyone else can see and has a father.
Passion in this world has to leap anathema
as it might be over the walls of a trench
and weeping is called a cold in the head.

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POETRY

What shall I do, by nature and trade

a singing creature (like a wire-sunburn! Siberia!)
as I go over the bridge of my enchanted
visions, that cannot be weighed, in a
world that deals only in weights and measures?

What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a

world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world?

That "measured world" includes not only the Soviet Union, but
America as well. Perhaps the Russian people take poetry and ficti
more seriously than we do in this country because they know th
consequences for their practioners of such arts. Writers of a later gene
tion than Mandelstam's, Akhmatova's, and Tsvetayeva's, have bee
exiled not through any humanitarian impulse, but in order to silen
them utterly by separating them from their native land and languag
Though they may escape martyrdom in a prison camp or state men
institution, away from the everyday music of their native tongue th
will find it difficult, in Akhmatova's phrase, to "preserve" their "Russi
speech". We must listen to them even though their words are shackle
in the "foreign chains" of inadequate translation; our attention may he
them to hope and encourage their translators to repay our hopes.

MICHAEL MESIC

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