What shall I do with this body they gave me
What shall I do with this body they gave me,
so much my own, so intimate with me?
For being alive, for the joy of calm breath,
tell me, who should I bless?
I am the flower, and the gardener as well,
and am not solitary, in earth’s cell.
My living warmth, exhaled, you can see,
on the clear glass of eternity.
A pattern set down,
until now, unknown.
Breath evaporates without trace,
but form no one can deface.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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We went out of our minds with the easy life
We went out of our minds with the easy life,
Wine from morning on, hungover by evening,
How can I keep this idle gaiety,
Your blush, O drunken plague?
An agonizing ceremony in a handshake,
Nocturnal kisses on the streets,
While the currents of speech grow heavy,
And lanterns burn like torches.
We wait for death, like the fairytale wolf,
But I'm afraid that the first to die will be
The one with the anxious red mouth
And the forelock covering his eyes.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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This night is irredeemable
This night is irredeemable.
Where you are, it is still bright.
At the gates of Jerusalem,
a black sun is alight.
The yellow sun is hurting,
sleep, baby, sleep.
The Jews in the Temple’s burning
buried my mother deep.
Without rabbi, without blessing,
over her ashes, there,
the Jews in the Temple’s burning
chanted the prayer.
Over this mother,
Israel’s voice was sung.
I woke in a glittering cradle,
lit by a black sun.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Go back to the tainted lap, Leah
Go back to the tainted lap, Leah,
Whence you came,
Because to the sun of Ilion
You preferred yellow twilight.
Go, no one will touch you,
Let the incestuous daughter
Drop her head on her father's breast
In the dead of night.
But the fatal change
Must be fulfilled in you;
You shall be Leah -- not Helen --
Thus not betrothed,
For it is harder for a king's blood
To flow in the veins than another's --
No, you will love a Jew,
You will vanish in him, and
God help you.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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I often shiver with cold
I often shiver with cold --
I want to be mute as a thing!
There is, in the skies, dancing gold
Sending me commands to sing!
Singer, be sad and upset,
Love, and remember, and call,
Catch, from a dark planet sent,
Light and magnificent ball.
That’s a true link, I believe,
With the mysterious worlds!
What an oppressive grief,
What a misfortune holds!
What if that star, as a pin,
Suddenly I’ll pierce my heart?
That one, which shimmering spins
Over the shop apart?
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Why do the clock-hopperssing
Why do the clock-hopperssing,
And fever rustle
And dry stove crackle --
It is red silk burning.
Why do the mice grind with their teeth
The slender ground of life --
A swallow has loosened
My shuttle for her daughter.
Why does rain murmur on the roof --
It is black silk burning,
But the cherry blossom will hear,
And on the bottom of the sea, forgive.
Because of the death of the innocent
And with no way to help,
In a nightingale's fever,
There is still a warm heart.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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That evening the forest of organ pipes did not play
That evening the forest of organ pipes did not play.
A native cradle sang Schubert for us,
The mill was grinding, the music's blue-eyed drunkenness
Laughed in the songs of the hurricane.
The brown-green world of the old song,
But only eternally young where the Erl-king
Shakes the rumbling crowns of nightingaled
Linden trees in savage rage.
The awesome force of night's return,
That wild song, like black wine:
It is a double, a hollow ghost
Peering senselessly through the cold window!
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Silentium
She has not yet been born:
she is music and word,
and therefore the untorn,
fabric of what is stirred.
Silent the ocean breathes.
Madly day’s glitter roams.
Spray of pale lilac foams,
in a bowl of grey-blue leaves.
May my lips rehearse
the primordial silence,
like a note of crystal clearness,
sounding, pure from birth!
Stay as foam Aphrodite – Art –
and return, Word, where music begins:
and, fused with life’s origins,
be ashamed heart, of heart!
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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When on the squares and in solitary silence
When on the squares and in solitary silence
We slowly go out of our minds,
Brutal winter will offer us
Cold and clear Rhine wine.
The frost offers us in a silver pail
The white wine of Valhalla,
And for us it recalls
A clear image of a northern man.
But northern skalds are rude,
Don't know the joy of the game,
And to northern troops are dear
Amber, feasts and flames.
They only dream of the southern air,
The magic of a foreign sky.
-- Nevertheless the stubborn friend
Still refuses to try.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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Still I have not died, and still am not alone
Still I have not died, and still am not alone,
while with my beggarwoman friend
I take my pleasure from the grandeur of the plain
and from its gloom, its hunger and its hurricanes.
In splendid poverty, luxurious beggardom
I live alone - both peaceful and resigned -
blessed are those days and nights
and blameless is the sweetly sounding work.
Unhappy the man who like his shadow
quivers at a bark, is scythed down by the wind,
and poor the man who, half alive himself,
from a shadow begs for charity.
poem by Osip Emilevich Mandelstam
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