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.
