Osip Mandelstam: from “Stone”

I hate the light that shines
From the monotonous stars.
Welcome back, old obsession of mine–
Tower that thins to an arrow of spire!

Stone, become a web,
A lace fragility:
Let your thin needle stab
The empty breast of sky.

My turn will come yet–
I feel the wings spreading.
So be it–but where is the target
Where living thought’s arrow is heading?

Perhaps I will come back here
When my path and my time both fade:
I could not love there
And here I am afraid…

–Osip Mandelstam (b. 15 January 1891)

Translation by Robert Tracy

Osip Mandelstam, Excerpt from “Tristia”

Кто может знать при слове–расставанье,
Какая нам разлука предстоит?
–Осипъ Мандельштамъ / Osip Mandelstam (b. 27 December 1891)

Who can predict, when farewell is mentioned,
What kind of parting will it be?
–Translation by Ilya Levin

To hear Mandelstam’s poem Tristia in its entirety, read in Russian and then in English (Brodsky’s translation in rhyme), try the following video for which we thank pernishus:

Mandelstam on Hellenism

Hellenism is a cooking pot, oven tongs, an earthenware jug of milk, household utensils, dishes, all the things that surround a human body; Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth recognized as something holy;  it is any possession that connects a man with some part of the world outside himself. … Hellenism is a man deliberately surrounded with utensils instead of with indifferent objects, the turning of indifferent objects into utensils, humanizing the surrounding world, warming a man with a gentle teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove beside which a man sits and enjoys the warmth as something akin to his internal warmth. … Hellenism is the system, in the Bergsonian meaning of the word, which a man sets up around himself.

–Osip Mandelstam

Translation by Robert Tracy

Photo: Skara Brae 2 by marcofantoni84