Heart Happy (cathy_edgett) wrote,
Heart Happy
cathy_edgett

A Poem for a Life!

 

Here are two translations of Osip Mandelstam's poem, Epigram against Stalin, which he may have only spoken and not written down until he was betrayed.  



The Stalin Epigram
by Osip Mandelstam
Translated by W. S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.




Epigram Against Stalin
Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Esther Allen from Jose Manuel Prieto's Spanish version.


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 mustache 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.


Subscribe

  • Each moment, a new beginning.

    In renewing what I do, I see I haven't been here since 2017 so this is a simple check-in to say I'm here on a beautiful day in May. I post here…

  • Return -

    I haven't been here in awhile and I return today to learn there is a "new post editor". I start to try it and then go back to the old. I am…

  • It's Morning!

    I've been here at Live Journal since October, 2005. I started it to keep in touch with family and friends as I went through cancer treatment.…

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    When you submit the form an invisible reCAPTCHA check will be performed.
    You must follow the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of use.
  • 0 comments