The Concert at the Station / Концерт на вокзале

BY Osip Mandelshtam
TRANSLATED BY Tony Brinkley & Raina Kostova
Russian
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Нельзя дышать, и твердь кишит червями,
И ни одна звезда не говорит,
Но, видит бог, есть музыка над намиб –
Дрожит вокзал от пенья аонид,
И снова, паровозными свистками
Разорванный, скрипичный воздух слит.

Огромный парк. Bокзала шар стеклянный.
Железный мир опять заворожен.
На звучный пир в элизиум туманный
Торжественно уносится вагон.
Павлиний крик и рокот фортепьянный.
Я опоздал. Мне страшно. Это сон.

И я вхожу в стеклянный лес вокзала,
Скрипичный строй в смятеньи и слезах.
Ночного хора дикое начало
И запах роз в гниющих парниках,
Где под стеклянным небом ночевала
Родная тень в кочующих толпах.

И мнится мне: весь в музыке и пене
Железный мир так нищенски дрожит.
B стеклянные я упираюсь сени.
Куда же ты? На тризне милой тени
В последний раз нам музыка звучит.

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English Translation

Breathing is forbidden, heaven teems
with worms — and not a star to testify —
but God sees, there is music overhead,
the station shivers, the Aonides are singing,
once again, the violins — their air fused — merging
with explosions of the locomotives’ whistles.

An enormous park. A station’s ball of glass.
Once more the iron world twists, bound in a spell.
Toward a nebulous Elysium — to a feast of sound —
the festive carriage sweeps away,
the peacock shrieks, the grand-piano thunders —
I am late. Afraid. This is a dream.

I enter the glass forest of the station, penetrate
the violin’s arrangement in confusion, tears, in turbulence.
Shy and savage, the night chorus’s wild opening,
and the smell of roses in decaying seed-beds
where a dear, familiar shadow spent the nights
beneath the glass sky, in the wandering crowds.

And I imagine that the iron world is shivering
like a beggar in the music and the foam.
I lean against the passages of glass.
From violin bows the hot steam breathes and blinds the eyes.
Where are you going? Here, at the funeral
of a kind-hearted shadow, for us, for the last time, music rises.

1921

 

Biography

OSIP MANDELSHTAM was born in Warsaw on January 15, 1891, mostly lived in St. Petersburg until the Russian Revolution, and then became a wanderer. At times a resident of Moscow, he was a political exile in Voronezh from 1934-1937 (he had written a poem that compared Stalin to a cockroach), and was a prisoner in the Gulag from May 1938 until his death on December 27, 1938. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok on the way to Kolyma.

His last great poem, unfinished when he died (“Lines on the Unknown Soldier”), ends with a self-portrait as victim and master (“and centuries / encircle me with fire”), Mandelshtam’s response, perhaps, to the question Stalin asked Pasternak in 1934, “But isn’t he [Mandelshtam] the master, isn’t he master?” Written just as the catasptrophes of World War I, the Revolution, and Civil War were giving way to an illusory moment of reprieve, “The Concert at the Station” is a companion poem for Mandelshtam’s autobiographical novella, The Noise of Time and its Proustian engagements with lost time. The Noise of Time begins with unwilled memories from childhood of “the glass railroad station in Pavlovsk” where “the change of conductors… seemed to me a change of dynasties”: “In the middle of the Nineties all Petersburg streamed into Pavlovsk as onto some Elysium. Locomotive whistles and railroad bells mingled with the patriotic cacophany of the 1812 Overture, and a peculiar smell… the humid air from the moldy parks, the odor of the decaying hotbeds and hothouse roses… blended with the heavy exhalations from the buffet, the acrid smoke of cigars, a burning smell from somewhere in the station, and the cosmetics of the crowd of many thousands… Once again I glance back at Pavlovsk and take morning strolls through all the walks and parquets of the station.” “The Concert at the Station” may be regarded as one of those strolls. For Mandelshtam, like Proust, Baudelaire’s flaneur is also a defining influence.

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. He also collaborates with RAINA KOSTOVA, who teaches at Jacksonville State University. Their translations of Mandelshtam’s poetry have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Shofar, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).

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