Illustration to Gogol story "Вий"
Osip Mandelstam
(1891-1938)
Как по улицам Киева-Вия
Ищет мужа не знаю чья жинка,
И на щеки ее восковые
Ни одна не скатилась слезинка.
Не гадают цыганочки кралям,
Не играют в Купеческом скрипки,
На Крещатике лошади пали,
Пахнут смертью господские Липки.
Уходили с последним трамваем
Прямо за город красноармейцы,
И шинель прокричала сырая:
"Мы вернемся еще - разумейте..."
May, 1937. Voronezh
d
Literal Translation
(The Russian original
is rhymed and metered, all feminine rhymes a/b/a/b)
As along the streets of
Kiev-Vij
Some wifey, I don’t know
whose, searches for her husband,
And onto her waxen
cheeks
Not a single tear flowed
down.
The gypsy lassies aren’t
telling fortunes for the floozies,
The fiddles aren’t
playing in the Kupechesky Gardens,
On Kreshchatik Street
horses have fallen,
And affluent Lipki
smells of death.
They’ve departed along
with the last tram car,
The Red Army soldiers
have absconded from the city,
And a damp greatcoat screamed
out:
“We’ll be back again;
count on that.”
d
U.R. Bowie
Mandelstam’s Poem
Freely Translated and Updated to the Year 2022
Gogol-Mogol’s Ogre
In Kiev-town,
now Vyiv monstrous,
Where
Gogol-Mogol’s ogre reigns,
Some little
wifey, don’t know whose,
In search of
hubby wanders lost.
While down her
cheeks, her waxy cheeks,
Trickles not one
tiny teary wetly.
No more floozies
getting fortunes told from gypsies.
No more fiddles
twanging tunes around Kupechesky.
On the main
drag of Kreshchatik fallen horses,
In environs what
was tanks is now scrap-metal; rusting.
There’s a smell
where rich folks live in Lipki:
Of Death.
Russian soldiers blew their
campaign to take Kyiv.
They’re making
tracks for some spot nearer Mother Rus,
While a
greatcoat that came straight from Gogolmogol Land,
Rumpled up and soaked
with kerosene,
Shrieks:
“Make no
mistake, you Ukies; we’ll be back!”
d
Translator’s Notes
Place names. The Kupechesky Gardens is now Kreshchaty Park.
Kreshchatik (now spelled Kreshchatyk by Ukrainians) is the main street of Kiev
(Kyiv). On Lipki (Lypky) from Wikipedia:
Lypky (Ukrainian: Липки) is a historic neighborhood of
the Ukrainian capital Kyiv located in the administrative Pecherskyi
District. The name is derived
from a lime tree (linden tree, Lypa). Lypky is the de facto government
quarter of Ukraine, hosting the buildings of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), Presidential
Administration and Government. In the nineteenth century Lypky was already
known as an elite district. Geographically Lypky is considered to be part of
Pechersk, yet it is located between the Old Kyiv neighborhood
(bordering by Khreshchatyk) and the Pechersk neighborhood
across the Klov descent and Mechnikov Street. The streets of Lypky were the
scenes of the most bloody episodes of the Euromaidan revolution (2013-2014).
d
Nikolai Gogol is the most famous Ukrainian firmly ensconced
in Russian literature. In the first line of Mandelstam’s poem Vij—often spelled
Viy in English translations—is the monster in Gogol’s ghost story of that
title. The greatcoat in the final stanza is another allusion to Gogol, to his most
famous story of all: the phantasmagoric tale “The Greatcoat,” sometimes
translated as “The Overcoat.”
This poem, apparently the last written during Mandelstam’s
exile in Voronezh, describes what was going on during the Civil War—in Kiev in
1919—when he was in the city with his future wife Nadezhda. In her memoir, Hope
Abandoned, she describes the situation as follows. “One day, just before we
left, when they were shooting hostages, we looked out of the window . . . and
saw a cart piled with naked corpses. Some matting had been carelessly thrown on
top of them, but limbs were sticking out in all directions.”
In his memoir, People, Years, Life, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg,
writes, “I saw him on that day (in 1919) when the Red Army was evacuating Kiev
(later he was to write about how ‘no more floozies were getting fortunes told
by gypsy women . . .’). Together with him I survived a pogrom one night.”
Mandelstam and Nadezhda made it out of Kiev safely in 1919,
but a perilous future awaited them. He was an “internal émigré” almost from the
very beginning of Soviet times. In 1934, after someone denounced him for his
poem criticizing Stalin—an act so reckless that Pasternak called it suicidal—Mandelstam
was arrested for the first time. After his release the brutal interrogations had
so unsettled his psyche that he twice attempted suicide.
A three-year exile in Voronezh ended in May, 1937—Nadezhda
was still with him. He had only a year and a half to live. Re-arrested in May,
1938, he was sentenced to five years in a concentration camp. He died in
December of 1938 at a transit camp in the Far East, near Vladivostok.
d
Now, in the year 2022, when we were naïve enough to think that
such horror, violence and repression of innocents would never happen again in
Russia or Ukraine, this, and even worse, is happening all over again. It’s
almost as if the Deity above had sent down some decree: Russian and Ukrainian
history will be, perpetually, drenched in gore and blood. Or is it, rather,
human history?
No comments:
Post a Comment