| Osip Mandelstam translated by Betsy Hulick | ||
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I sing when my throat is wet and my soul is dry and when my eye is moist, and my mind does not lie. Does the wine taste good? are the furs not fine? Does the rhythm of Colchis dance in the blood? And the breast constricts, and the tongue is still.. It is not me who sings; it is now only breath, and my hearing is held in the mountain's sheath and my head is deaf. The song serves itself, takes praise from no other, to my enemies, hot coals, to my friends, a delight. The single-hearted song, growing out of moss, the single-voiced gift, of the hunter's way, which is sung from the saddle on high plateaux, on abundance of breath drawn without measure and to one end only: in anger, with honor, to get daughters and sons without stain to their wedding. -posthumous # 56
OSIP MANDELSHTAM is one the great Russian poets of our century. He was born in 1891 of Jewish parents and was brought up in St Petersburg, now Leningrad. His persecution by the Soviet authorities for his evident lack of ideological conformism began in earnest in the 1930s, and in 1934 he was arrested. He died in Eastern Siberia, on the way to a labor camp. BETSY HULICK
has translated prose and poems by Neruda, Brecht, Pushkin and others. |
