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