Untitled (I execute a smoky ritual)

BY Osip Mandelshtam
TRANSLATED BY Tony Brinkley & Raina Kostova
Russian
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Исполню дымчатый обряд:
В опале предо мной лежат
Морского лета земляники —
Двуискренние сердолики
И муравьиный брат — агат,

Но мне милей простой солдат
Морской пучины — серый, дикий,
Которому никто не рад.

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English Translation

I execute a smoky ritual —
my disgrace, an opal — and before me
by the sea, the summer strawberries —
carnelians — heart-cored, candor —
their ant brothers, agates —

but to me, much dearer, is a
common
soldier’s sea-depths — gray,
obscured. He pleases no one.

July 1935, Voronezh

 

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?” In a late draft of “The Unknown Soldier,” Mandelshtam wrote as master: “All the living, all of life will name me.”

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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