"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Great with potters, blue Crete, isle of green,
Where they’ve baked their talent, their gift
Into sonorous earth. Can you hear the delphine,
Subterranean blow of their fins?
There’s the sea, speak of the devil,
Where the clay’s found joy in the fire
And the gelid rule of the vessel
Split in two—into sea and desire.
Give me back, bluest isle, wingéd Crete,
What is mine—my work and my labor,
Let the burnt vessel suckle and eat
Of the teat of the surging goddess.
All this was done and sung of yore,
Turning blue, long before the time
Of Odysseus, and even before
Food and drink were called yours and mine.
Star of the ox-eyed firmament,
Go on, get well, heal up in the rays,
And the flying fish, too—but a happenstance,
And these waters that always say yes.
March 1937
Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High
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Translator’s note: This poem about Crete from March 1937 also takes up Mycenaean-Minoan civilization with a focus on its ceramics. The discovery of Mycenaean presence on Crete—and the theorization of its domination over (or hybridization with) Minoan culture—was a fairly recent development, the result of early twentieth-century studies and excavations (beginning with Sir Arthur Evans’s 1900 dig of the Minoan palace at Knossos). Pottery from Mycenaean (or Minoan) cultures in the collection of the Voronezh museum would have likely depicted dolphins, flying fish, and other sea creatures, as well as circular motifs that resemble “ox-eye” sunflowers (heliopsis). One extant variant for the last line of the second stanza yields an image of the vessel “split in two—the sea and the eye.”
Mandelstam imagines this pre-classical era on Crete (“before the time of Odysseus”) as a non-individualistic communal utopia, where “mine” and “yours” do not adhere. (In Russian, both possessives are first-person singular, but with different gender endings in connection to their objects, food [feminine] and drink [neuter].) Scholar Mikhail Gasparov suggests that Mandelstam’s depictions of early civilization in the poems written on the heels of “Verses on the Unknown Soldier”—where he imagines a class war of apocalyptic proportions that might lead to a classless future—coincides with contemporaneous Soviet theorization of pre-classical civilizations as pre-class societies exhibiting a “primitive communism.” The mention of the “surging goddess” suggests that Mandelstam was aware of Evans’s theories about a matriarchal order in Minoan Crete.
The imperative “get well” in the finale may be addressed to Nadezhda, who had been ill for several months and whose health was the subject of many of Mandelstam’s pleading letters to friends and family. (In another poem of this time, he sends Nadezhda to the stars for survival.) Given that the poem also pictures the poet potentially recovering “my work” from the island, it may be a directive to himself. In any case, alogical as it may seem—and there is more alogism in the late Mandelstam than has previously been allowed into English translations—the grammar here reads as a command to the “star of the ox-eyed heaven [sky]” itself (i.e. the sun) to soak up its own rays, which would suggest a desire for the restoration of this ancient culture. Yet, though the poem ends with the Mediterranean’s resounding “yes,” there’s an ambiguity about whether this whole episode of human history was but a “happenstance,” a chance event (случайность [sluchainost’]).
For more on the context in which Mandelstam composed this poem, see the opening note to “The Vessel.”
—Matvei Yankelevich