Импрессионизм / Impressionism

BY Osip Mandelshtam
TRANSLATED BY Alistair Noon
Russian
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Художник нам изобразил
Глубокий обморок сирени
И красок звучные ступени
На холст, как струпья, положил.

Он понял масла густоту —
Его запекшееся лето
Лиловым мозгом разогрето,
Расширенное в духоту.

А тень-то, тень все лиловей,
Свисток иль хлыст, как спичка, тухнет,—
Ты скажешь: повара на кухне
Готовят жирных голубей.

Угадывается качель,
Недомалеваны вуали,
И в этом солнечном развале
Уже хозяйничает шмель.

23 мая 1932

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English Translation

Here, the artist has managed to put
the lilac’s deep faint onto canvas,
which he covers with something resembling scabs,
the paint’s resounding footsteps.

The thickness of oil? He understands it.
This is his summer — all baked,
then re-warmed by a violet brain —
the season that heat makes expand.

But that shadow grows ever more violet,
a whistle or whip goes out like a match —
“Those”, you’ll say, “are chefs in a kitchen
with plump pigeons under their knives.”

You can guess there’s a swing. The artist
hasn’t finished the veils in his painting.
Here in this sunlit disintegration,
the bumble bee is in charge.

23 May 1932
 

Biography

OSIP MANDELSHTAM was born in 1891 and grew up in St. Petersburg. He traveled in the Caucasus, was exiled to the city of Voronezh, and deported to a labour camp in the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938. He published two books of poetry, Stone and Tristia, in his lifetime. Other work has appeared posthumously as The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937.

ALISTAIR NOON‘s publications include a translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (Longbarrow Press, 2010), a full-length collection, Earth Records (Nine Arches Press, 2012), and other chapbook and magazine publications. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

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