By Osip Mandelshtam
(1910, 1935**)
She hadn’t yet been born at all,
She is the word, she is the music,
And, thus, between all living being
A never-ceasing binding pull.
Aquatic breasts are calmly breathing,
But, like a madman, beams the day.
And sea-foam’s paling lilac’s lain
Within a blackly-azure vessel.
Oh, would my lips somehow procure
A mute, a protoplastic, silence,
Like notes of crystal crystallizing,
At once, in birth and essence pure!
Remain a sea-foam, Aphrodite,
And, word, back into music lay,
And, heart, before a heart feel shame,
Into life’s mainspring flowing melted!
* Silentium - Muteness (from the Latin)
** One of Mandelshtam’s earliest published verses and first successes (at least among some of his eventual poetic peers, champions, and collaborators), this poem first appeared in 1910, in the pages of the Apollo journal, at that time still dominated by an older Symbolist guard, but soon to become the primary publishing organ of the young Acmeists: members of the first Poets’ Workshop, Mandelshtam among them. This poem, which through its title and themes alludes to the eponymous poem by Tyutchev, is often read as a veiled manifesto of Mandelshtam’s early poetics. It is also among the poems revised by Mandelshtam in 1935, though the alterations are fairly superficial in this instance.