Stalin Mugshot, 1911
Father of the Soviet People, 1936
Осип Мандельштам
(1891-1938)
Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны,
Наши речи за десять шагов не слышны,
А где хватит на полразговорца,
Там припомнят кремлёвского горца.
Его толстые пальцы, как черви, жирны,
А слова, как пудовые гири, верны,
Тараканьи смеются усища,
И сияют его голенища.
А вокруг него сброд тонкошеих вождей,
Он играет услугами полулюдей.
Кто свистит, кто мяучит, кто хнычет,
Он один лишь бабачит и тычет,
Как подкову, кует за указом указ —
Кому в пах, кому в лоб, кому в бровь, кому в глаз.
Что ни казнь у него — то малина
И широкая грудь осетина.
1933 г.
d
Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
Soso
Underfoot all’s a-tremble, for our country’s gone blurred,
Ten steps from us none of our words can be heard;
When we find enough speech to converse, a half schmeer,
We mention the Kremlin’s renowned mountaineer.
His fingers are fat, and like worms, squirmy-greasy,
And his words are like true-blue barbells from Tbilisi;
His handlebar cockroach-style moustaches laughing,
And his boot tops are gleaming and ever so dashing.
Around him swirl bureaucrats, vermin thin-necked,
He plays with this half-human sycophant sect.
One whistles, one meows, one whimpers, one kids,
He alone clonks on noggins and jabs hard at ribs.
One decree, then another, he forges like horseshoes—
A groin-kick, eye-poke for you, yours and youse—
Lopping off heads is just part of the deal
For this broad-chested guy made of Ossetian steel.
d
Translator’s Note
The “Stalin Epigram,” one of the most famous/notorious poems of twentieth-century Russian literature, was written in November of 1933. The poem of course could not be published, but Mandelstam read it to some twelve persons—at least one of whom denounced him to the authorities. When he read it to Boris Pasternak, his fellow poet responded as follows: “То, что вы мне прочли, не имеет никакого отношения к литературе, поэзии. Это не литературный факт, но акт самоубийства, который я не одобряю и в котором не хочу принимать участия. Вы мне ничего не читали, я ничего не слышал, и прошу вас не читать их никому другому. Translation: What you’ve just read to me has nothing to do with literature or poetry. This is not a literary artifact, but an act of suicide, which I do not approve of and do not want to participate in. You read me nothing, I heard nothing, and I beg you not to read it to anyone else.”
The only surprising thing is that Mandelstam was not arrested and executed as soon as the poem came to light. But Stalin himself—who had a dark sense of humor—was rumored to have liked it. He allowed the poet to go on living, in various places of exile, until 1938, when he was arrested and died in a transit camp in Vladivostok, on his way to the Gulag.
Words Used and What They Allude To (most info here is from Wikipedia)
Soso: the poem is not titled in the original; I have given it this title in my translation. Soso was Stalin’s nickname in his Georgian childhood. He originally was Ioseb [Joseph] (“Soso”) Jughashvilli (sometimes spelled Dzhugashvilli). Stalin (“Man of Steel”) is a nom de guerre, like Lenin, a revolutionary name.
First stanza: The mountaineer (горец) alludes to Stalin’s origins in Georgia and the Caucasus Mountains.
Second stanza: “His fingers are fat . . .” In her reminiscences Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how the poet Demyan Bednyj “was careless enough to write in his diary that he did not like lending books to Stalin, because the latter left on the white pages smudges from his greasy fingers.”
Tbilisi: capital of Georgia, Stalin’s homeland, now the independent Georgian Republic. The word is not in the original, but presented itself as the perfect rhyme for greasy in my translation.
Third stanza: “clonks on noggins . . .” Reminiscences of Stalin emphasize how he liked to play around with his confederates, leaders of the Politburo. In meetings at his dacha he made them dance with one another. He enjoyed humiliating them, bonking them on the head, pulling them by an ear, or poking them in the ribs.
Fourth stanza: in this poem the word raspberries (малина) has nothing to do with raspberries. I’ve looked at the some dozen translations of this poem into English on the website ruverses.com, and it appears that not a single translator figured this out. Most of them just ignore the word, not knowing what the hell it’s doing there; a few make lame attempts to get some raspberries into the translation.
Малина in the jargon of the criminal underworld means a scheme or endeavor (“the job”—a caper, theft, robbery, or other criminal plan or act). E.g., “Он испортил всю малину” (literally, “He spoiled all the raspberries”) means “He put the quietus on the whole deal.” See Kratkij slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo zhargona (A Brief Lexicon of Modern Russian Jargon), compiled by M.M. and B.P. Krestinsky (Posev: 1965), p. 16. The next to last line in the poem means roughly that executions are part and parcel of Stalin’s criminal machinations. Using a slang word current among criminals could be an allusion to his revolutionary youth when he was known as Koba. Among other felonious activities, he participated in kidnappings for ransom, protection rackets, and robbing banks.
More on malina--note in a e-mail from Andrei Filippov, which I add below, with thanks to him:
Только что прочитал ваш перевод стихотворения О. Мандельштама с примечаниями. Позвольте небольшое уточнение. На фене, русском блатном жаргоне, слово "малина", насколько мне известно, означает место проживания или сбора группы, место хранения добычи и место проведения свободного времени. Это может быть дом, квартира, ресторан и т. д. То есть это географическая точка, а не сама группа. Я могу ошибаться, но за свои 60 с лишним лет я не встречал другого определения.
The gist in English: "as far as I know the word "malina" signifies the place where a criminal gang, lives, hangs out or keeps its booty. That can be a house, apartment, restaurant, etc. In other words, it's a geographical place, and the word does not refer to the gang itself. I may be mistaken, but . . . I've never heard another definition of the word.
Ossetian: Stalin was a Georgian, not an Ossetian, but his hometown of Gori was located near Southern Ossetia.
d
In the original variant of the poem the first stanza went like this:
Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны,
Наши речи за десять шагов не слышны,
Только слышно кремлёвского горца —
Душегубца и мужикоборца.
Literal translation:
We live, not sensing the country beneath us,
What we say is not heard ten steps away from us,
Only audible [are the words of] the Kremlin mountaineer:
A murderer and oppressor of peasants.
