"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
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