Untitled (With no need to speak)

BY Osip Mandelshtam
TRANSLATED BY Tony Brinkley & Raina Kostova
Russian
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Ни о чем не надо говорить,
Ничему не следует учить,
И печальна так и хороша
Темная звериная душа:

Ничему не хочет научить,
Не умеет вовсе говорить –
И плывет дельфином молодым
По седым пучинам мировым.

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English Translation

With no need to speak,
nothing to be learned —
how sad and how blessed
is the dark, animal soul

that has no need to learn,
nothing to be told —
a young dolphin diving
in the shadows of the world.

1909, Petersburg

 

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?” “With no need to speak,” among Mandelshtam’s earliest poems, was unpublished during his lifetime. It is hard to read without thinking of Rimbaud, and is indicative of the force of French poetry in Mandelshtam’s poetry.

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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