We live apart from our land
Our words dying at 10 paces
And anything put edgewise
Concerns the Kremlin backwoodsman
His coarse fingers are thick, like worms
His statements trusty, like the weights
on a scale
Cockroaches smile on his upper lip
And the rims of his shoes blind
He is surrounded by a flock of
pencil-neck hacks
He plays on the servility of half-men
Who whistle, who meow, who sob
But he alone roars and sticks it in
Forging his edicts like so many
horseshoes
One in the groin, one on the brow, one in the eye
Execution is his relish, this Southerner
With an open heart
By Osip Mandelstam, November 1933;
translation © Roger Pulvers, 2008
Our words dying at 10 paces
And anything put edgewise
Concerns the Kremlin backwoodsman
His coarse fingers are thick, like worms
His statements trusty, like the weights
on a scale
Cockroaches smile on his upper lip
And the rims of his shoes blind
He is surrounded by a flock of
pencil-neck hacks
He plays on the servility of half-men
Who whistle, who meow, who sob
But he alone roars and sticks it in
Forging his edicts like so many
horseshoes
One in the groin, one on the brow, one in the eye
Execution is his relish, this Southerner
With an open heart
By Osip Mandelstam, November 1933;
translation © Roger Pulvers, 2008
Has there ever been a poet with more courage? This is Osip Mandelstam's "ode" to the Russian dictator Josef Stalin (1878-1953). His reading of it to a small group of people, one of whom informed on him, led to his arrest and death on his way to the gulag 70 years ago, on Dec. 27, 1938.
Mandelstam's take on the world had never adjusted to what was called "Soviet reality." For one thing, he was a neo- classicist much too intimately tied, in his mind, his lifestyle and his poetry, to the pre-Russian Revolution idea of what constituted civilization. He himself wrote that he was dedicated to "the golden coin of the European humanist legacy."