The Vessel

Guilty debtor of long-lasting thirst,
Wise procurer of wine and water—
Fruit ripens to the music and goats
Dance in circles along your borders.

Of the troubles on your red-black rim
Shrill flutes swear and whistle and rage—
And there’s no one to get a tight grip
And to set those troubles straight.

March 21, 1937

                          Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High

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Translator’s note: The poems Osip Mandelstam composed during his three-year exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, more than ninety in all, are divided into notebooks corresponding to three distinct periods of poetic production, with the three poems in this issue of Harp & Altar belonging to the third notebook. They are some of the last poems Mandelstam wrote during his exile as part of the book-length work he projected under the working title The Voronezh Notebooks, but would not see published in his lifetime. He died about a year and a half after their composition in a transit camp in the far east of the Soviet Union. 

The spring of 1937 was both a hopeful and desperate time for Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda. Their period of exile was coming to a close, and their release was not far off. However, their financial situation was terrible, and Nadezhda was often ill, while Mandelstam himself had been through periods of very poor health exacerbated by his nervous condition. He still harbored the hope of publishing a book of his new poems on his return to Moscow, though his submissions to journals and his letters to the Writers Union went mostly unanswered. He wrote sometimes desperate letters to friends (often including the latest poems in manuscript), begging for monetary support or for intervention on his behalf with the higher-ups at the Writers Union, at times hinting that they should bring his situation to the attention of Stalin himself.

The ekphrastic poem of March 21—often referred to as “The Vessel” (Кувшин [kuvshin]), and sometimes published with that title—riffs on the ancient Mediterranean (Mycenaean or Minoan) pottery Mandelstam saw in the antiquities hall of the Voronezh museum, which he and Nadezhda frequently visited. The protagonist of the poem—the krater or wine jug itself—is cast as both suspect and destined for a tragic end. It is a “guilty debtor” to those who drink from it, and “procurer” (i.e. a pimp of sorts) for the meeting (i.e. mixing) of wine and water, a practice common in antiquity. (The Russian word translated here as “procurer”—сводник [svodnik]—suggests the facilitation of sexual encounters or other unsavory or even illegal activities, but is too archaic to be translated as “pimp.”) The scenes of festivity and fecundity painted on the vessel contrast with its troubled fate. The final lines underscore its helplessness: No one will come to its aid, to avert its inevitable cracking, or to save the civilization it represents. Is the vessel a synecdoche for the inevitable demise of Mycenaean civilization (itself a synecdoche for the “Western” civilization Mandelstam would have termed “world culture”), or—also—for the poet’s uncertain future?

—Matvei Yankelevich

“Great with potters, blue Crete, isle of green”

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

“The greek flute’s theta and iota — ”

The greek flute’s theta and iota—
As though it lacked rumor and speech—
Unsculpted, reporting to no one,
Languished, ripened, ditch after ditch…

And none can abandon or lose it,
Nor soothe it, gritting one’s teeth,
Nor with the tongue force or push it
Into words. Even lips won’t wrench it apart…

For the flautist, no rest and no quiet:
He thinks he’s in a world of his own,
That from lilac clays he had sculpted,
His native sea long ago…

With the ringing whispers of his lips—
Aspiring lips that remember by whispers—
Miserly, tidy, hoarding sounds in his grip,
He quickens his pace to be thrifty…

Kneading clay to death in our palms,
In his footsteps we cannot repeat him.
When the sea filled me up to the brim—
My meter to me was a murrain…

But to me my own lips are no lovers
And this murder is of the same root—
Toward loss I unwittingly lower
The balancing force of the flute…

April 7, 1937

                          Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High

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Translator’s note: Dated April 7, 1937, this poem is widely acknowledged to concern Karl Shwab, a flautist in the Voronezh symphony orchestra and an acquaintance of the Mandelstams, who had been arrested a few months earlier, in December 1936, on charges of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization. (It was alleged that he listened to Hitler’s speeches over the radio.) The image of the flautist’s lips echoes Mandelstam’s metaphors for poetic composition (the movement of lips, whispers, breath, etc.) and suggests a synecdoche of musician=poet. As it happens, Shwab died in the same transit camp as Mandelstam—in a neighboring barracks—in January 1939, about a month after the poet.

One scholar argues that the “Greek” flute and the invocation of the Greek alphabet suggest Plato’s dialogue on the exclusion of both poets and flautists (and flute-makers) from the ideal republic as a relevant background to the poem. (Flutes appear elsewhere in the Voronezh poems, as in the design on the wine jug in “The Vessel,” and, most notably, in the very first poem of the series, “Black Earth,” where the plowed earth plays “a rotting flute” and the agricultural cycle gives rise to the poet’s newfound voice.)

The ditches in the first stanza recall the pervasive agricultural references of the Voronezh cycle, as well as recurring images of WWI trench warfare and the war-torn landscapes in “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” Mandelstam’s longest poem, completed over the first two weeks of the previous month. (That poem, likely begun earlier the same year, was meant as the counterpart of a diptych with “Verses on Stalin,” often referred to as the odious “Ode” to Stalin, and frequently suppressed in Western editions.) The references to clay suggest the flutes of classical Greek antiquity, uniting this poem with the themes of several others composed in March and April of 1937, including the two other poems in the current selection. The “native sea” imagined by the flautist in his revery is the Mediterranean, the cradle of Western civilization, a recurring theme in the late poems of the Voronezh period.

The final line (in the currently favored manuscript source) includes a neologism—равнодействие [ravnodeistvie]—derived from the Russian terminology for the concept (in physics) of a “resultant” or “net” force. The neologism brings to mind (or to the ear) the word for “equinox,” which is just one letter off (равноденствие [ravnodenstvie]) and is itself the title of an early Mandelstam poem, from 1914, in which a “reed flute” is a crucial image. (“Equinox” appears in the last line of some manuscript versions of the poem, and Mandelstam may have tried it in his drafting of the stanza, but ultimately rejected it as a result of his “battle with Acmeism,” his earlier poetic adherence.) We have translated the neologism as “balancing force” to suggest the allusion to physics, but also to retain the “equilibrium” or “level” position of the flute, which allows us to make sense of the image of “lowering” the instrument “toward loss.”

For more on the context in which Mandelstam composed this poem, see the opening note to “The Vessel.”

—Matvei Yankelevich