Osip Mandelstam

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

“I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”

“I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.”

“Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,Acquire their forms before we do”

“Il ventoIl vento a noi consolazione portòe nell'azzurro fiutammoali assire di libellulevibrazioni d'angolosa tenebra.E di minaccia di guerra ottenebròlo strato inferiore dei cieli rabbuiati,bosco micaceo membranosodi corpi volanti a sei bracciaNell'azzurro c'è un angolo ciecoe nei beati meriggi c'è sempre,come accenno di notti che si condensi,una tremula stella densa di fato.E a fatica aprendosi la stradanella squama delle ali storpiate,sotto la sua mano dall'alto prendel'universo sconfitto Azrail.”

“I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,a little honey, a little sun,in obedience to Persephone's bees.You can't untie a boat that was never moored,nor hear a shadow in its furs,nor move through thick life without fear.For us, all that's left is kissestattered as the little beesthat die when they leave the hive.Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,at home in the dark wood on the mountain,in the mint and lungwort and the past.But lay to your heart my rough gift,this unlovely dry necklace of dead beesthat once made a sun out of honey.― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972”

“One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.”

“We live without feeling the country beneath our feet, our words are inaudible from ten steps away. Any conversation, however brief, gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man. His greasy fingers are thick as worms, his words weighty hammers slamming their target. His cockroach moustache seems to snicker, and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam. Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains, he toys with the favors of such homunculi. One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps; he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn. Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes, he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead, a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye. Every execution is a carnival that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.”

“Я счастлив жестокой обидою,И в жизни поxожей на сон,Я каждому тайно завидуюИ в каждого тайно влюблен.”

“A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.”

“I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.”

“And I walk out of spaceInto an overgrown garden of values,And tear up seeming stabilityAnd self-comprehension of causes.And your, infinity, textbookI read by myself, without people -Leafless, savage medical book,A problem book of gigantic radicals.”

“If our enemies take meAnd people stop talking to me,If they confiscate the whole world—The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go onAnd that people, like a judge, shall judge,And if they dare to keep me like an animalAnd fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,But shall write what I am free to write,My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,And in a corner of the ominous darkI shall yoke ten oxen to my voiceAnd move my hand in the darkness like a ploughAnd, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,And in the depths of the unguarded nightThe eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shineAnd a flock of flaming years swoop down,And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.But on this earth (which shall escape decay)There to wake up life and reason will be”

“My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.”