Mandelstam -- A Biography

(Researcher’s Notes #3)

Aaron, Rafi (1959)

Original Text

Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam, ed. Allan Briesmaster (Hamilton, Ontario: Seraphim Editions, 2006): 19.

1Do not begin with a date of birth. Remember we are discussing

2the man who smashed the glass of the hall clock so that the

3hands stopped in 1938. Then the minute hand and the hour

4hand bent themselves into another form -- a compass or a

5navigational instrument -- so that his words sailed on to another

6century.

7Now spread the years apart so that the facts fall free of the man

8as he strides to the podium, the poems opening like a room

9among the ruins, the light crawling out of the veins of rock and

10onto the altar, the artifacts and the large squares, those

11mysteries where you placed your thoughts and returned to

12watch them be blessed or beheaded by a power that propelled

13the darkness through the day.

14Then remember his breath was a flame and a fountain, the

15secret police were tortured by what they could not catch or kill,

16the poems were free and stalking the country, the peasants

17harvesting nouns when there was no wheat.

18Death. All we can say for certain is no one ever saw him dead,

19there is no grave or marker, the poet’s words continued to work,

20mingling with the common language, hammering at the knee of

21an idol.

22Second last sighting: January 1990. After fifty-two years of living

23in faded notebooks and whispers that circled through

24immigrant cafés his voice was officially heard in Moscow.

25Last sighting: two nights ago. The streets were dark and

26deserted. The storm pounded my windows. I gripped the wheel

27and saw a man without an umbrella or a hat. His pace was

28unhurried and he did not delude himself by holding a jacket or

29a newspaper over his head. He did not stop or take notice of

30me. He just kept walking.

Notes

6] Joseph Stalin's government arrested Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), a Russian poet, during the 1930s and exiled him and his wife Nadezhdato Cherdyn in the Northern Ural. After being allowed to move to Voronezh in southwestern Russia, he was re-arrested in 1938 and sentenced to the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp near Vladivostok, where he died. See The Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (State University of New York Press, 1973). Back to Line

Publication Start Year

2006

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2012

Form

prose poem