Osip Mandelstam and the
Modernist Creation of Tradition
•
C L A R E C AVA N A G H
•
P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Copyright1995 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cavanagh, Clare.
Osip Mandelstam and the modernist creation of tradition / Clare Cavanagh. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03682-9
1. Mandel’shtam, Osip, 1891–1938—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.
PG3476.M355Z59 1994 891.71′3—dc20 94-11248
This book has been composed in Galliard
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America
T
HE
A
RTICULATION OF
S
IBERIA
When the deaf phonetician spread his hand
Over the dome of a speaker’s skull
He could tell which diphthong and which vowel
By the bone vibrating to the sound.
A globe stops spinning. I feel my palm
On a forehead cold as permafrost
And imagine axle-hum and the steadfast
Russian of Osip Mandelstam.
• C O N T E N T S •
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS,
AND TRANSLITERATION
xiii
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: The Modernist Creation of Tradition
3
CHAPTER TWOSelf-Creation and the Creation of Culture
29
CHAPTER THREE
Making History: Modernist Cathedrals
66
CHAPTER FOUR
Judaic Chaos
103
CHAPTER FIVE
The Currency of the Past
146
CHAPTER SIX
Jewish Creation
193
CHAPTER SEVEN
Powerful Insignificance
215
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chaplinesque, or Villon Again: In Place of an Ending
279
APPENDIX
305
NOTES
313
• A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S •
T
HE CREATION
of tradition is, Mandelstam insists, a collaborative
en-deavor, the work of “colleagues” and “co-discoverers.” A book is no less a
collaboration, and for whatever merits this study may possess I am
in-debted to many—although its faults are entirely my own. A poet finds his
true reader only in posterity, Mandelstam laments. As a graduate student,
I was more fortunate. I had three readers: Donald Fanger, Stanislaw
Ba-ranczak, and especially Jurij Striedter, whose reading of my
work—scrupu-lous, generous, and inspiring—was my best graduate education; and my
book and I have both benefited from their continued interest in my
re-search on Mandelstam.
Many other colleagues and co-discoverers have helped this book along
its way. Svetlana Boym and Andrew Kahn helped to shape my thought early
on through memorable conversations about Mandelstam, and Andrew
Kahn’s encouragement and criticism have been invaluable at every stage of
this project’s evolution. I was lucky to find in my senior colleague at the
University of Wisconsin, David Bethea, an inspired interlocutor, astute
critic, and generous friend, whose unflagging faith in “the manuscript that
wouldn’t die” helped bring the book to life. Others—Jane Garry Harris,
Judith Kornblatt, Charles Isenberg, Caryl Emerson—gave much-needed
support and advice at critical stages in the book’s development. Jennifer
Presto, Mandelstam fan and research assistant extraordinaire, went far
be-yond the call of duty as I struggled with the manuscript’s beginnings in
1989–90. Andrew Swenson’s assistance at the project’s conclusion was
equally invaluable. As materials on and by Mandelstam began to proliferate
in a Russia anxious to revive a suppressed poetic past, I relied on the
kind-ness of friends and colleagues—Margaret and Mark Beissinger, Eliot
Borenstein, Yuri Shcheglov, Irina Bagrationi-Mukhraneli—to provide me
with texts that had not yet reached the West. My parents, John and Adele
Cavanagh, have been generosity itself—they have helped in more ways than
I can name. Fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the
Social Science Research Council helped to fund my work on Mandelstam
early on; subsequent support and leave time granted me by the
Univer-sity of Wisconsin Graduate School and Department of Slavic Languages
allowed me both to expand the scope of my study and to bring it to a
conclusion. My editors at Princeton University Press, Robert Brown and
Marta Steele, provided assistance and encouragement throughout the
ar-duous process of turning the manuscript into a book.
xii
• A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S •entitled “The Modernist Creation of Tradition: Mandelstam, Eliot and
Pound,” appears in
American Scholars on Twentieth-Century Russian
Lit-erature, ed. Boris Averin and Elizabeth Neatrour (St. Petersburg: Petro-Rif
Publishers, 1993): 400–421. Chapters 6 and 8 appeared in abbreviated
form as the following articles: “The Poetics of Jewishness: Mandel’shtam,
Dante and the ‘Honorable Calling of Jew,’ ”
Slavic and East European
Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1991): 317–38; and “Rereading the Poet’s
End-ing: Mandelstam, Chaplin and Stalin,”
PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 1 (January
1994): 71–86. This last essay is reprinted by permission of the copyright
holder, The Modern Language Association of America.
The quotation from “Chaplinesque” in
The Complete Poems and Selected
Letters and Prose of Hart Crane
by Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber,
copyright 1966 by the Liverright Publishing Corp., is reprinted by
permis-sion of W. W. Norton Publishers. The quotations from T. S. Eliot,
The
Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950, copyright by T. S. Eliot 1962,
re-newed by Esme Valerie Eliot in 1971, are reprinted by permission of
Har-court Brace and Company. The quotations from Osip Mandelstam,
Sobra-nie sochinenii, 4 vols., edited by G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff,
copyright 1967–69, 1981 by Inter-Language Literary Associates and the
YMCA Press, are reprinted by permission of the YMCA Press. Ezra
Pound’s poem “Histrion” in
Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited
by Michael John King, copyright 1976 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound
Literary Property Trust, is reprinted by permission of New Directions
Pub-lishers. The quotation from Canto I in
The Cantos of Ezra Pound,
copy-righted 1971 by Ezra Pound, renewed 1972 by the estate of Ezra Pound,
is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishers. The quotation
from Ezra Pound’s parody of “Under Ben Bulben” is taken from his
collec-tion
Pavannes and Divagations, copyrighted 1958 by Ezra Pound and
quoted by permission of New Directions Press. The quotation from
Wil-liam Butler Yeat’s “Byzantium” in
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats,
cop-yright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1956 by the Macmillan Publishing
Co., is reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Publishing Co. I also
would like to thank Seamus Heaney for his generous permission to use his
poem “The Articulation of Siberia” as this book’s epigraph.
T R A N S L A T I O N S ,
A N D T R A N S L I T E R A T I O N
U
NLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
, all prose translations are taken, with some
modifications, from
The Prose of Osip Mandelstam,
trans. Clarence Brown
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; abbreviated in the text as
POM); and Osip Mandelstam,
The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed.
Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor:
Ardis Press, 1979; abbreviated in the text as CPL). The volume and page
number of the original Russian text in the Struve/Filipoff edition of
Man-delstam’s work will be given whenever the translation has been
substan-tially altered or the original Russian is cited along with the English
transla-tion (Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. Vols. 1–3: ed. G. P. Struve, B. A. Filipoff.
Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associations, 1967–69. Vol. 4: ed.
G. P. Struve, N. Struve, B. A. Filipoff. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981). Poems
will be referred to in the text by their number in the Struve/Filipoff edition
of Mandelstam’s writing. All translations of the poetry are my own, unless
otherwise noted. For the purposes of this study, I have placed accuracy and
readability over artistic merit in my English renditions of Mandelstam’s
Russian; unfortunately and inevitably, then, what makes his poems poems
in the original has thus been lost even more thoroughly than is usual in the
translation of verse.
• C H A P T E R O N E •
Introduction:
The Modernist Creation of Tradition
Perhaps the strongest impulse towards a shift in the approach to
language and linguistics . . . was—for me, at least—the turbulent
artistic movement of the early twentieth century. The great men
of art born in the 1880’s—Picasso (1881– ), Joyce (1882–1941),
Braque (1882– ), Stravinsky (1882– ), Khlebnikov (1885–1922),
Le Corbusier (1887– )—were able to complete a thorough and
comprehensive schooling in one of the most placid spans of world
history, before that “last hour of universal calm” (poslednii chas
vsemirnoi tishiny) was shattered by a train of cataclysms. The
lead-ing artists of that generation keenly anticipated the upheavals that
were to come and met them while still young and dynamic enough
to test and steel their own creative power in this crucible. The
ex-traordinary capacity of these discoverers to overcome again and
again the faded habits of their own yesterdays, [joined] together
with an unprecedented gift for seizing and shaping anew every
older tradition or foreign model without sacrificing the
stamp of their own permanent individuality in the
amazing polyphony of ever new creations.
—Roman Jakobson, “Retrospect” (1962)
I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin,
Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” [Gumilev] the Eiffel Tower,
and, apparently, [T. S.] Eliot.
• •
I
NVENTION AND
R
EMEMBRANCE
One often hears: that is good but it belongs to yesterday. But I say: yesterday has not yet been born. It has not yet really existed.
—Osip Mandelstam, “The Word and Culture” (1921)
To speak of modernist culture as a culture born of crisis and catastrophe
seems to have become in recent years a critical commonplace, a cliché no
longer adequate to the phenomena it purports to describe. Indeed, much
recent discussion of the modernist movement in European and American
culture has focused precisely on exposing what one scholar has called “the
myth of the modern,” the myth, that is, of a radical break with a past that
modern artists continued to draw on even as they mourned—or
cele-brated—its loss. Such skepticism can be bracing, and certainly it is
neces-sary if we are to achieve anything like a critical distance on a movement
whose parameters are as ill-defined and shifting as those of modernism.
1Revisionist approaches to the modernist sense of an ending should not,
however, lead us to overlook the degree to which this particular truism is
rooted in historical fact. The modernist artist may have exagerrated the
uniqueness of his historical situation: other generations, other ages and
cultures have experienced upheavals and disasters that seemed truly
cata-clysmic at the time and that had a profound and lasting impact on the art
and thought that sprang up in their wake. Moreover, the Judeo-Christian
models that have shaped Western culture predispose us to perceive all
his-tory in terms of “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.”
2Living as we do in
the extended aftermath of the modernist movement, we may find it
diffi-cult to give credence to the French poet Charles Péguy’s hyberbolic claim,
made in 1913, that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it
has in the last thirty years”; history has not yet screeched to a dead halt, nor
has the modern world or the human condition changed beyond all possible
recognition as we draw to the end of this century and the millennium. The
modernist artist had, however, historically grounded reasons for
consider-ing that what he lived in was indeed a qualitatively different kind of society,
a technologically transformed, radically innovative, international “culture
of time and space.” And the Great War, the War to End All Wars—along
with the massive social upheavals that followed in its
aftermath—undoubt-ably left a generation of artists and thinkers with scars, both literal and
fig-urative, of a kind that previous generations would have found difficult to
imagine.
3• •
rehearse the many horrors that have shaped the course of modern Russian
history. But even if we strip away the inflated, apocalyptic rhetoric that
col-ors so many poetic accounts—Symbolist, Futurist, and Acmeist alike—of
the Russian experience of war and revolution, we are left, nonetheless, with
the genuine, profound sense of an ending and accompanying shock of the
new that lent the Russian modernist movement such energy and finally
such poignance.
Péguy makes his claim for the birth of a new age in 1913. Other
mod-ernists dated the death of the past somewhat differently. “It was in 1915,”
D. H. Lawrence announces, that “the old world ended”; while Virginia
Woolf proclaims, with even greater assurance, that “on or about
Decem-ber, 1910, human nature changed.” Anna Akhmatova was one of the few
poets to survive the disasters that befell what Roman Jakobson
propheti-cally called, in a famous essay of 1931, “the generation that squandered its
poets.” She thus bore firsthand witness to the many tragedies, national and
personal, that followed in the revolution’s wake. Nonetheless, the date she
picks for the beginning of the new era comes close to those moments of
crisis chosen by Lawrence and Woolf. As she looks back on the past from
her vantage point in 1944—in the midst of yet another cataclysm, World
War II—she watches “not the calendar, but the real twentieth century
ap-proach” along the Petersburg embankments of 1913. Osip Mandelstam
joins in this modernist chorus as he mourns the modern loss not just of past
times, but of time itself as earlier generations had understood it: “The
frag-ile reckoning of the years of our era has been lost,” he laments in “Pushkin
and Skriabin” (1916; CPL, 91).
4• •
This kind of opposition—between Pastists and Futurists, Archaists and
Innovators, Apollonian preservers and Dionysian destroyers—is far too
schematic to encompass the range of responses to the pervasive modern
sense of rupture with the past, as Ellmann and Feidelson readily admit. For
a variety of reasons, though, it has proved remarkably resilient on Russian
soil, and nowhere is this literary two-party system more in evidence than in
the responses to Russian modernist poetry. Indeed, the poetry itself might
seem to invite just such a polarized reaction. The Russian post-symbolists,
in hindsight at least, appear to have divided themselves neatly into two
camps, as if for the convenience of future researchers: the Futurists were
dedicated, as their name suggests, to casting unwanted cultural ballast off
the “Steamship of Modernity”; while their coevals and competitors the
Ac-meists, whose name proclaimed their allegiance to the
akme, the highest
and best that Western and Russian culture could offer, were equally bent
on demonstrating that this “Steamship of Modernity” was “the ship of
eternity,” the ship entrusted with bearing past treasures of world culture
into an unknown future. In postrevolutionary Russia, the very notions of
“past” and “future,” of “tradition” and “innovation” became valorized to
a degree that made it still more difficult to cross these particular party lines
in quest of an accurate assessment of the presence of the poetic past in
Futurist writing, and of avant-garde innovation at work among the
“pas-tist” Acmeists.
6This thumbnail sketch cannot do justice, poetic or otherwise, to the
complicated history of Russian post-symbolist art—but it is not my goal
here to address the many problems and issues involved in the critical
recep-tion of this poetry. I want to turn now instead to the real subject of my
study, to Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) and his modernist invention of
tradition. I have spoken of the Acmeist commitment to “world culture”;
the phrase itself is Mandelstam’s. Shortly before his final arrest in 1938, he
defined the Acmeist aesthetic as a “yearning for world culture (toska po
mirovoi kulture)”; and he thus provided us with the best possible
short-hand description of the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose.
This definition might seem initially to place Mandelstam and his poetics
squarely in the camp of the cultural “passéists” (CPL, 176; II, 346). Taken
from its proper context in his work, it might appear to signal a hopeless,
helpless longing for an all-encompassing culture that existed once but has
long since disappeared, or that has known its only life in the pipe dreams
and poems of traditionless modernists. The vast scope of Mandelstam’s
po-etic ambitions, which will be satisfied with nothing less than all of Western
culture, attests inversely to the intensity of his sense of cultural deprivation.
If modernist artists considered themselves to be the casualties of “an
apoc-alypse of cultural community,” then Mandelstam must be ranked among
the movement’s most representative figures.
7• •
Freidin observes that “only a cultural orphan growing up in [Russia’s]
rev-olutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous
construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the
impossibility of belonging to a single place.” When Mandelstam was born,
and where, and to whom—all three conditions apparently conspired to
keep him from the European and Russian cultural legacy he craved. He was
born, he writes, “in the night between the second and the third/Of
Janu-ary in the ninety-first/Uncertain year, and the centuries/Surround me
with fire” (#362). In his autobiography
The Noise of Time
(1925),
Mandel-stam laments a generation of Russian modernists born beneath “the sign of
the hiatus” (POM, 122) and thus deprived by history of the cultural
trea-sures that should have been theirs by rights. But Mandelstam would not
have stood to inherit these treasures in any case. His parents, as he
de-scribes them in
The Noise of Time, were themselves orphans of sorts,
Cen-tral European Jews who, uprooted from their own culture, were not at
home in their adoptive nation either. Mandelstam himself, born in Warsaw,
could not claim Russia and its culture as his birthright. Even as an adopted
motherland, though, Russia presented him with as many problems as it
solved. It was itself an orphan, “the orphan of nations,” in Belinsky’s
phrase, uncomfortably straddling the border between East and West, a
feu-dal past and the foreign present forcibly imported by Peter the Great.
8Mandelstam’s definition of Acmeism appears to place him in the
para-doxical position of being a pastist who had no past he could legitimately
call his own. This paradox brings us in turn to the apparent
contradic-tion contained in the title of my book, the contradiccontradic-tion that lies at the
heart of Mandelstam’s work. It is not finally the intensity of Mandelstam’s
sense of loss that distinguishes him among his fellow modernists. It is the
energy and the imagination with which he sets about converting his deficits
into assets as he works to create a usable past for himself and for a
genera-tion of artists that found itself abandoned by history. Gifted with the
capac-ity to generalize from his own dilemma, to convert isolation to connection,
to turn disruption to his advantage, and to use all these skills in the
ser-vice of an encompassing cultural vision, Mandelstam was singularly well
equipped to address his own and his epoch’s paradoxical legacy of
disinher-itance; and he responded with one of modernism’s most complex,
ambi-tious, and challenging visions of tradition.
• •
present. The very act of remembering the past changes it irreparably, and
this is as it should be, according to Mandelstam. “Invention and
remem-brance go hand in hand in poetry,” he insists in his essay “Literary
Mos-cow” (1922). “To remember also means to invent, and the one who
re-members is also an inventor” (CPL, 146).
Invention and remembrance: this complex and energizing dialectic
shapes Mandelstam’s work and the vision of tradition it both embodies and
describes from his earliest poems and essays to the last “Voronezh
Note-book” (1937). It is ideally suited to the needs of the cultural orphan who
must invent his way into the past that he desires—but it also demonstrates
the ways in which Mandelstam was able to turn necessity to his artistic
ad-vantage. The dialectic he develops to counter his sense of loss and isolation
serves to place him at the very heart of a modernist art preoccupied with
what Guillaume Apollinaire calls the modern “debate between tradition
and invention.” Like Mandelstam’s inventive remembrance, the very
no-tion of a modern tradino-tion is an “apparent oxymoron,” as Charles Russell
notes, and the ground of this paradoxical tradition “is always slipping out
from under [modern] writers’ and artists’ feet.” It slips from beneath the
feet of critics as well. Ellman and Feidelson issue the following disclaimer
as they struggle to define their own version of
The Modern Tradition
(1965): “If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is a
paradoxically untraditional tradition.” Renato Poggioli reaches much the
same conclusion when he speaks, in his
Theory of the Avant-Garde
(1968),
of modernism’s reliance on a self-consciously “anti-traditional tradition.”
My goal in this chapter and the chapters that follow is chiefly to trace the
workings of Mandelstam’s invented tradition as it takes shape in both his
poetry and his prose. But I also call attention to the ways in which
Mandel-stam’s seemingly
sui generis
version of tradition serves to tie him to other
modernist writers and thinkers—Russian, European, and American—who
struggled to make sense of the past in an age apparently bent upon turning
all history on its head.
10• •
assume he knew and read. However, this very vision of an international,
multilingual community of poets serves to mark him as a modernist; and he
shares this vision with other modern poets, most notably T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound, whose work he could not have known. (He could not read
English, and their work was virtually unknown in Russia at the time he was
writing.) If we are to understand what is specifically modernist in
Mandel-stam’s work, and what is distinctively Mandelstamian about his particular
brand of modernism, we must make the same kind of unexpected and, one
hopes, illuminating, connections that Mandelstam and other “modern
poet-synthesizers” placed at the heart of their endeavor (CPL, 116).
12Our
understanding of his work would be impoverished indeed without the
glimpses of a larger modernist context that a comparably “synthetic”
criti-cism—a criticism that takes into account not only subtext, but context,
that examines affinities as well as influence—can provide.
13Modernism generally makes for strange bedfellows, as this chapter’s first
epigraph attests. Roman Jakobson begins his pocket-sized portrait of the
linguist as a young man by creating a backdrop in which Russian poets and
composers rub shoulders with French architects, Spanish painters, and
Irish novelists—even as he emphasizes their shared need to reinvent the
various foreign and native traditions that inform their creations. The
com-pany Akhmatova keeps in the opening passage of her unfinished memoirs
is no less unlikely; she was born, she claims, in the same year as were
T. S. Eliot, her fellow Acmeist and first husband Nikolai Gumilev,
Tol-stoy’s famous novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Charlie Chaplin, and, of all
things, the Eiffel Tower. Such juxtapositions are entirely true to the spirit
of the modernist movement, and necessary to its proper understanding.
Indeed, Akhmatova and Jakobson suggest as much by prefacing their
self-portraits with these modernist collages.
14• •
and work that should not be rooted too firmly in any form of purely
“pas-tist” aesthetics. The same warning holds true for Mandelstam and his
in-vented tradition, and I will now turn to some of the affinities that
Mandel-stam shares with several unlikely modernist comrades-at-arms.
M
ODERNIST
G
ENEALOGIES
On or about December 1910 human nature changed. . . . All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants,
husbands and wives, parents and children.
—Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)
You cannot carry around on your back the corpse of your father. You leave him with the other dead.
—Guillaume Apollinaire,The Cubist Painters(1913)
Following the revolution, Nadezhda Mandelstam notes, the
comtemporar-ies of Akhmatova and Mandelstam “seriously thought of them as old
peo-ple,” although both notorious pastists were in reality not much over thirty.
After the publication of Kornei Chukovsky’s influential essay on
“Akhma-tova and Mayakovsky” (1920), the Acmeist movement came to be
per-ceived as the essence of a dying culture that had quickly outlived what little
usefulness it had for the new regime. Chukovsky is basically sympathetic
when he describes Akhmatova as the “heiress of an old and high culture”
who “values her inheritance [and] her many ancestors: Pushkin,
Bara-tynsky, Annensky.” He contrasts her with Mayakovsky, who has “no
ances-tors” and is mighty not in his precursors but his descendants. Chukovsky
concludes, however, by proposing not a purge of the poetic past, but a
fusion of the “Akhmatova” and “Mayakovsky factions” in a Soviet poetry
that has learned to cherish its prerevolutionary legacy. Other critics,
in-cluding Mayakovsky himself, were less temperate. In a 1922 talk,
Maya-kovsky calls for a “clean-up of modern poetry” and begins by casting the
Akhmatovas of the world on Trotsky’s dust heap of history: “Of course, as
literary landmarks, as the last remnants of a crumbling order, they will find
their place in the pages of histories of literature. But for us, for our age,
they are pointless, pathetic and comic anachronisms.” And in an essay on
“The Formalist School of Poetry” (1923), Trotsky himself remarks acidly
that “it does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life
of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists.”
16• •
for art’s sake, the creator of a poetry almost too pure for this world in the
best of times, and certainly not up to the monumental tasks set by the
mod-ern age for would-be poets of the future. He composes only “chamber
music” in an age that demands Mayakovskian marches, Jakobson notes in
an essay of 1921. And Iurii Tynianov echoes Jakobson in “Interim”
(“Pro-mezhutok,” 1924), as he gives us a Mandelstam who is a “pure lyricist,” an
otherworldly poet who deals only in “small forms” refined almost out of
existence.
18It is difficult to find traces of this quiet, well-mannered poet in the essays
of the twenties, essays that celebrate a Russian history that is “active,
force-ful, thoroughly dialectical, a living battle of different powers fertilizing one
another” (CPL, 141), and a Russian language formed “through ceaseless
hybridization, cross-breeding and foreign-born (chuzherodnykh)
influ-ences” (CPL, 120). (And in this last phrase, we also see the foreign-born
Mandelstam writing himself into the Russian tradition he describes.)
Man-delstam’s versions of Russia’s past and language might do double duty as
descriptions of his world culture and invented tradition. “Poetic culture,”
he asserts in “Badger Hole” (1922), “arises from the attempt to avert
ca-tastrophe” (CPL, 137). We may be tempted to hear Jakobson’s chamber
musician at work here, struggling in vain to tune out the discordant noise
of his times. There is, however, another, more convincing way to read this
statement. Mandelstam’s poetic, or world, culture (they are one and the
same) not only manages to stave off impending disaster time and again. It
actually requires the continuous stimulus of crises barely contained, if it is
to survive and flourish. Mandelstam himself implies as much when he
speaks in the same essay of culture’s “catastrophic essence” (CPL, 137).
Mandelstam longs for his world culture not because it is lost forever,
trapped in an irrecoverable past. This culture is beyond his reach precisely
because it is, as Freidin suggests, under continuous construction, and, one
might add, under a continuous “threat of destruction” as well (POM, 79).
Mandelstam weaves the upheavals that mark his and his age’s histories into
the fabric of a resilient tradition that draws power from the very forces it is
intended to combat.
• •
the members of one family” (POM, 130). If we substitute “strong poet”
for Eikhenbaum’s “great poet” and combine his remarks with
Mandel-stam’s vision of literature as an endlessly squabbling family, we come up
with a version of poetic tradition that looks very like Harold Bloom’s more
recent notion of a poetry that derives its force from the ceaseless battling of
poetic parents and their rebellious offspring.
20In such traditions,
Apolli-naire’s debate between tradition and innovation turns into something
con-siderably less civil. It becomes a heated argument that threatens to erupt
into the literary equivalent of war. But we need not look as far afield as
Bloom to uncover comparable visions of a disruptive modern tradition.
Modern Russian artists and thinkers were by necessity adept at weaving
catastrophe into the substance of their visions, and it is not surprising that
we should find similar theories of tradition far closer to home.
The authors of these theories might have been startled to find themselves
in such company. For all his astute observations on Mandelstam’s poetics,
Iurii Tynianov clearly views Mandelstam as one of the exemplary
poet-archaists at war with their more experimental brethren in his monumental
study of literary
Archaists and Innovators
(1929). The tradition Tynianov
describes in this study bears, however, clear affinities with Mandelstam’s
lively, combative world culture. To the scholars of other ages, Tynianov
claims, literary history may have seemed to follow an even course and its
changes appeared to occur in “peaceful succession (preemvstvennost’).”
The principle of genuine literary transformation lies, however, not in
sim-ple succession but in “battle and takeover”; and traditions grow through
“upheavals,” in “leaps and bounds (smeshchenie, skachok),” not through the
systematic evolution posited by earlier, happier generations. Indeed,
Man-delstam anticipates Tynianov when he speaks in “The Wheat of Humanity”
(1922) of all history and culture as driven by “catastrophe, unexpected
shifts, destruction (katastrofa, neozhidannyi sdvig, razrushenie).”
21Only happy families are alike—or so Tolstoy claims in the famous
open-ing lines of
Anna Karenina.
There are striking similarities, though,
be-tween the unhappy literary families that emerge in the traditions described
by Mandelstam, Tynianov, and his fellow Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Such
unstable, crisis-ridden traditions would seem to lead inevitably to broken
homes, disrupted families, and skewed, peculiar genealogies, and indeed,
in Tynianov’s version of the ongoing struggle between literary fathers and
sons, children inherit from their parents only by displacing them, and
bat-tle-hardened young artists often end up inadvertently “resembling their
grandfathers more than the fathers who fought with them.” Writers avoid
unwelcome parental interference in a still more roundabout way in the
tan-gled family tree that Shklovsky proposes in an essay of 1923. “In the
his-tory of art,” Shklovsky insists, “the legacy is transmitted not from father to
son, but from uncle to nephew.”
22• •
pick and choose the ancestry that suits them in his early poem “I have not
heard the tales of Ossian” (1914; #65). “I’ve come into a blessed legacy,”
he announces in the poem’s final stanzas:
Hu'ix pevcov blu'da[]ie sny_
Svoe rodstvo i skuhnoe sosedstvo
My prezirat; zavedomo vol;ny.
I ne odno sokrovi]e, byt; mo'et,
Minuq vnukov, k pravnukam ujdet,
I snova skal;d hu'u[ pesn[ slo'it
I kak svo[ ee proizneset.
The wandering dreams of other bards; We’re free to despise consciously Our kin and our dull neighbors.
And this may not be the only treasure, either, To skip the grandsons, descending totheirsons, And a skald will once again set down another’s song And speak it as though it were his own.
Brave words indeed—but such absolute freedom from the burden of the
past is more easily proclaimed than practiced, as Mandelstam’s own poetry
demonstrates. Suffice it to note for now, though, that the poem not only
provides us with yet another skewed and twisted modernist genealogy. It
also indicates the ways in which disinheritance may become a form of
liber-ation for the poet unlucky enough to have been born with an
unprepos-sessing family tree and raised in less than inspiring cultural company. Such
a poet, if he is daring and desperate enough, may find himself in possession
of a past and present community far grander than anything his actual
ori-gins might have seemed to portend. Poetic justice can at last be served, and
fairy tales may finally come true, as cultural paupers contrive to take
posses-sion of princely treasures through ingenuity and pluck—or so “Ossian”’s
optimistic young author would have us believe. Though Mandelstam’s
later writings inevitably complicate this triumphant early vision, it remains
nonetheless the ideal, ideally liberating version of tradition to which
Man-delstam will return throughout his poetry and prose.
T
HE
S
HIPWRECK OF
M
ODERNITY
Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence.
But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names.
Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name.
• •
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
—T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land(1922)
Mandelstam was adept at deriving cultural capital from apparently
irreme-diable losses, and in his prose of the early twenties particularly, he manages
time and again to turn the modern sense of an ending to his own purposes.
He appears to mourn the modern rupture with the past in “Humanism and
the Present” (1923): “The chaotic world has burst in—into the English
‘home’ as well as into the German
Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian
stoves, banging our dampers and oven doors. . . . No laws preserve the
house from catastrophe, provide it with any assurance or security” (CPL,
182). And it is not merely our homes that are at risk, he warns in “The End
of the Novel” (1922). Our very selves are at stake, as we bear collective
witness to “the catastrophic collapse of biography”: “Today Europeans are
plucked out of their own biographies, like balls out of the pockets of
bil-liard tables, and the same principle that governs the collision of bilbil-liard
balls governs the laws of their actions” (CPL, 200). We have all fallen prey
to a universe governed by contingency and chaos alone, as earlier ways of
ordering experience fall far short of the needs of the modern age.
The collapse of European culture may actually work to the advantage of
the modernist orphan in search of cultural community, as Mandelstam
demonstrates in “The Nineteenth Century” (1922), where his own
di-lemma and his generation’s merge. “We appear as colonizers to this new
age, so vast and so cruelly determined,” Mandelstam proclaims: “To
Eu-ropeanize and humanize the twentieth century, to provide it with
teleolog-ical warmth—this is the task of those emigrants who survived the shipwreck
of the nineteenth century and were cast by the will of fate upon a new
his-torical continent” (CPL, 144). After the collapse of history and the
ship-wreck of the nineteenth century, all modern survivors are equally orphans
and emigrants in the unknown land that is the twentieth century. The
Jew-ish émigré turned Russian modernist finds his true community through
disruption, and he takes his place at the center of his uprooted age as he
works to articulate its mission.
• •
blessed with long, distinguished cultural traditions from countries whose
pasts are more erratic, marked with the “incoherence and gaps” that
Man-delstam sees as the trademark of both his family’s and his adopted nation’s
history (POM, 172). And this is where we find the ties that link
Mandel-stam not so much to his fellow Europeans as to two Americans, T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound, who turned to Europe’s past and present in search of
what Eliot would also come to call “world culture.” Mandelstam’s
di-lemma and his compensatory vision were singular, but they were not
unique; and it is no accident that two companions with whom he
unwit-tingly shared his quest for an encompassing culture came, like him, from a
country that stood uneasily on the outskirts of the European tradition.
23In Pound’s oblique self-portrait of the artist “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
(1920), he mourns his hero’s birth “in a half-savage country, out of
date.”
24Mandelstam himself could conceive of only one country whose
“impenetrable thickets” (CPL, 87) were less hospitable to culture’s
shap-ing energies than those of his adopted homeland. The “elemental forests”
and “mighty vegetation” of American civilization are, he claims in an early
essay, “impenetrable to the life-giving rays of culture” (CPL, 99). This
America is clearly akin to the Russia—a “young country of half-animated
matter and half-dead spirit” (CPL, 81)—that Mandelstam seeks to
colo-nize with the aid of Petr Chaadaev in his 1915 essay on the romantic
phi-losopher.
25And although we need not take Mandelstam’s characteristic
hy-perbole entirely at face value, America, like Russia, has always stood at an
uncomfortable remove from the centers of European culture, and it shares
with Russia a profound ambivalence toward the continent and the tradition
to which it both does and does not belong. Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound
were alike, too, in sensing not only the difficulties, but the possibilities that
accrued to the ambitious poet-synthesist who found his native land sorely
lacking in the cultural legacy that could feed his outsized needs.
“The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all he has, even of his family
tree, and follow art alone,” Eliot announces in
The Sacred Wood
(1920).
26The freedom that Mandelstam claims for the poet in “I have not heard the
tales of Ossian” becomes an imperative for Eliot, but the impulse that lies
behind both statements is recognizably the same, and the art both poets
follow leads them in similar directions. Mandelstam’s Jewish emigrant
ori-gins made his relations with his adopted homeland even more complex
than Eliot’s with his native land. Eliot and Mandelstam were alike, though,
in their early sense that their inherited pasts barred them from the
Euro-pean culture they required, and they were alike in their insistence on the
poet’s right to choose his own ancestry and sources. The provincial
mod-ernist is free to orphan himself in the hopes of achieving a more
distin-guished lineage and a richer, more rewarding legacy.
• •
sought everywhere—in history, in culture, in art.” In a late essay Eliot
claims that the ideal tradition grows from “the hereditary transmission of
culture within a culture.”
27But the younger Eliot knew, as Mandelstam
did, that his only hope for the heritage he sought lay in creative
appropria-tion and inventive disrupappropria-tion. Mandelstam’s Chaadaev may have venerated
“the sacred bond and succession of events”; but dispossessed poets who,
like lands they come from, lack “continuity and unity,” are forced to find
more roundabout ways to acquire traditions not rightfully theirs by birth
(CPL 84, 88).
One method is theft. Great poets “pile up all the excellences they can
beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries,” Ezra
Pound announces in an early essay on Dante. And Eliot echoes Pound in
a famous dictum from “Philip Massinger” (1920): “Immature poets
imi-tate; mature poets steal.” Mature poets steal, and so do dispossessed ones,
like Mandelstam’s François Villon, Pound’s Dante, or Pound, Eliot, and
Mandelstam themselves. For the Mandelstam of the twenties and thirties,
cultural theft becomes a way of life; true, unofficial culture thrives, like the
poets who shape it, on “stolen air” (CPL, 316). The young Eliot chooses
a less dubious route to European culture, a route that reveals his own
ori-gins in a nation of self-made citizens who value industry over inherited
for-tune and family name. Tradition, Eliot proclaims in “Tradition and the
In-dividual Talent” (1919), “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must
obtain it by great labour.” Honest labor replaces thievery in this version of
events, which is nonetheless still the cultural vision of the “Displaced
Per-son” or “resident alien,” who must start from scratch and struggle
cease-lessly to work his way into his chosen tradition.
28Eliot’s tradition places a
heavy burden on the shoulders of the assiduous outsider who must work to
earn his culture. It burdens him—but it also grants him special privileges.
Tradition cannot be inherited. It cannot be sustained by passive reception
or unreflecting repetition, and those who might appear to be in the direct
line of succession are actually ill-served by their inherited histories. They do
not perceive, as an outsider might, the need to work for what appears to be
their birthright. They lack the drive and desire that come “from the fact of
being everywhere a foreigner” and that are the special property of the
pe-rennial outsider.
29tradi-• •
tion, a tradition “to which he is not bound by inheritance,” “precisely by
the right of being a Russian”; and he energizes the sleepy, tradition-bound
West by his foreign, unfettered presence (CPL, 88).
Eliot’s disinherited American goes one step further. “It is the final
per-fection, the consummation of an American,” Eliot declares, “to become
not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European,
no person of any European nationality can become.” The young
Mandel-stam observes the Europe he covets in the outlines of a map: “For the first
time in a century, right before my eyes,/Your mysterious map is shifting!”
he exclaims (#68). The perspective could only come from one who stands
outside the picture’s frame. Only the outsider, unconstrained by national
boundaries, can hope to see Europe whole. And only the outsider can lay
claim to all of its treasures, past and present, by becoming a true
Euro-pean—or so Eliot implies. In
The Sacred Wood, Eliot laments the American
“remoteness in space from the European centre,” but this very remoteness
may also generate the “tendency to seek the centre” that permits the
for-eigner to become not a born, but a self-made, European. Mandelstam was
very much aware that the new arrival who comes to Europe seeking unity
ends by inventing his own West. Like Eliot and like his Chaadaev, he was
nonetheless possessed by the “wholeness hunger” of modern poetry, and
the whole that Mandelstam and Eliot longed for lay, like Chaadaev’s, in a
Europe visible only to the eyes of the perennial outsider.
31• •
the modern world, accompanied Mandelstam throughout the exile,
perse-cution, and isolation he endured in Stalin’s Russia of the thirties.
33“We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of
the Roman Empire,” Eliot proclaims in a late essay. It is one thing to see
a culture whole and another thing entirely to enter it, though. How does
an outsider come to inherit a civilization that apparently moves in
unbro-ken succession from ancient Rome to modern Europe? If Europe is already
a whole, does it allow for or require further additions? Does it want the
contributions of outsiders? How are uprooted modernists from the
out-skirts of Western culture, upstart poets, “wanderers with no fixed abode,”
to find their way into this tradition, even with plenty of hard work or
dili-gent theft? Where are the apertures and gaps that will admit them?
34Such
problems are particularly tricky for the modernist from the provinces, from
the large flat places along the edges of European history. He must come to
terms not only with the pervasive modern sense of an ending; he must also
cope with the no less troubling knowledge that he has not even had the
opportunity to lose the culture he misses because it was never his to begin
with. The provincial modernist in search of an encompassing tradition is
barred from his longed-for inheritance not only by time, but by space. He
is distant from the European center in every possible way. He may have
come too late for European culture, but he was not in its direct line of
succession in any case. Geography and history have already seen to that.
The provincial modernist can turn the disruptions of the modern age to
his advantage, though. The modern collapse of “the world of time and its
connections,” though it may seem to mean the collapse of tradition itself,
can actually lead to a new kind of tradition, one that permits the outsider
to defy space and time—and this is true for Pound and Eliot as well as
Mandelstam.
35With the “shipwreck of the nineteenth century,” all are
freed to stake their claim to those treasures of the past that still remain. In
this new and orphaned age, Europeans and provincials, cosmopolitans and
country cousins are equally out of place and ill at ease. The old order may
have vanished, but, with the line of succession broken once and for all,
endless possibilities open up for those who are willing to invent as well as
remember as they shape new wholes from the fragments of vanished pasts.
T
HE
F
AMILY OF
P
HILOLOGY
In poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed and the elements of one language exchange greetings with those of
another over the heads of space and time.
—Osip Mandelstam, “Remarks on Chénier” (1914–15)
Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community.
• •
Thus am I Dante for a space and am One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief.
—Ezra Pound, “Histrion” (1908)
Dante, Mandelstam insists, “is an antimodernist.” The reasons he gives for
Dante’s antimodernism, are, however, precisely what make his Dante
mod-ern. “His contemporaneity,” Mandelstam claims in his “Conversation
about Dante” (1933), “is continuous, incalculable and inexhaustible”
(CPL, 420): “Having combined the uncombinable, Dante altered the
structure of time or perhaps, on the contrary, he was forced to a glossolalia
of facts, to a synchronism of events, names and traditions severed by
centu-ries, precisely because he had heard the overtones of time” (CPL, 439).
Dante employs, in other words, the techniques of the modernist outcast to
create his poetic culture. The modern poet who is sensitive to the
over-tones, or the noise, of his times realizes that the very crisis of the age has
laid an inexhaustible wealth of traditions and names before him. He is free,
with Dante, to shape a new synchronic order from the inexhaustible
con-temporaneity that is history in the modern age.
“Today,” Mandelstam announces in “The Word and Culture” (1921),
“a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place”: “In sacred frenzy poets
speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. As the
room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is
flung open before the crowd. Suddenly everything becomes public
prop-erty. Come and take your pick” (CPL, 116). All are free to bid as the
hold-ings of the old world are auctioned off. The “modern poet-synthesizer”
(CPL, 116) may pick and choose, or mix and match his pasts, for all ages
are equally close at hand. Phenomena have been liberated, along with the
provincial modernist, from the tyranny of sequence and succession; and the
poet, if he is able “to preserve the principle of unity amidst the vortex of
changes and the unceasing flood of phenomena” (CPL, l17), can take the
pasts he desires and create from them a new order, a new history, a new
lineage and new community that exist in defiance of time and space.
• •
capitals of Europe. It is ideal for the poet who is a child both of the
prov-inces and of the modern age.
36In his prescription for a simultaneous tradition, Eliot insists on
whole-ness, history, and order. In “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandelstam
demands a “principle of unity” that will give shape to the unstable
land-scape of modern civilization (CPL, 117). The world that these poets
envi-sion, freed from its moorings in time and space, would seem, however, to
lend itself more readily to chaos than to culture. The possibilities of the
modern age are inextricably bound to its problems, and even the most
gifted, ambitious poet-synthesizer might falter before the task of
trans-forming the age’s hodgepodge of places, people, dates, and artifacts into a
cohesive culture. How is the poet-synthesist to proceed if what he seeks is
not fragments from a vanished past but a new kind of living whole, not
complete liberation from history but creative dialogue with it? What
cul-ture can accommodate both history and simultaneous order? What
tradi-tion can withstand the shocks of the modern age and retain its wholeness,
while holding room for newcomers and outsiders? How is one to preserve,
or discover, a principle of unity that will provide both coherence and
flexi-bility amid the vortex of changes that is the modern age?
Language, Mandelstam observes in “On the Nature of the Word,”
“changes from period to period, never congealing for a moment. Yet at
every point, within the confines of all its changes, it remains a fixed
quan-tity, a ‘constant’ that is blindingly clear to the philological consciousness.
At every point it remains internally unified.” It may thrive, like
Mandel-stam’s Russian, on ceaseless hybridization. Still “it will always remain true
to itself”; it will retain at every moment its identity and inner unity (CPL,
120). Mandelstam’s Russian changes and grows throughout history. It
de-rives its energy from difference, from variety and “inoculations of foreign
blood” (POM, 81). It possesses, nonetheless, a wholeness that cannot be
undone by its heterogeneity, and an integrity that persists in spite of its
transformations in history. This integrity is apparent at every moment to
the philologically sensitive mind of the linguist or the poet.
• •
grows and develops in time” and that “keeps all times simultaneous” while
it grows. It changes endlessly, yet it is continuous. It outlasts the fall of
empires and ages while bearing at every moment its complex, hybrid
his-tory within it. “Behind every sound we utter extends a hishis-tory of ordered
changes and remote cultural transactions,” Kenner notes, and “the poetic
of our time grows from this discovery.”
38The modernist poet need only speak, then, to lay claim to the complex
network of histories and cultures that inhabit his native tongue and tie his
speech to other languages and traditions. “It was possible,” Kenner
com-ments, for the Anglo-American modernist “to ignore the national
litera-tures, to conceive poetry as international and interlingual . . . [hence] the
literature of Europe, like its speech, could be conceived as one rich
organ-ism, and the study of poetry be seen as inextricable from the study of
phi-lology.” “The very idea of an interlingual community of poets” stems for
Eliot and Pound from “the great idea that languages were siblings, that a
creating urgency flowed across their (miscalled) boundaries.”
39The
En-glish-speaking modernist may simply turn to his native English in order to
receive instant access to a poetic community that ignores the divisions
be-tween languages, ages, and nations.
“Philology is the family,” Mandelstam announces in “On the Nature of
the Word” (CPL, 123). Once again, though, he finds himself possessed of
the wrong family tree. Russian, of course, derives from different sources
than does English; and Mandelstam’s great essay is preoccupied with the
problem of how to lay claim, on his own behalf and on Russia’s, to the
classical and European heritage he requires to complete his imaginatively
refigured genealogy. He is finally forced to claim kinship with European
culture on the basis of Russian’s inner, non-etymological affinity with the
Western tradition—but the resourceful poet-synthesist is no more daunted
by the gaps in his linguistic genealogy than he is by the lacunae in his
liter-ary inheritance. His hybrid Russian contains, he claims, an “inner
Hellen-ism” that guarantees its access to a larger Western tradition (CPL, 127).
• •
community this language creates, for it is the same language and
commu-nity to which they themselves aspired.
This philological community offers multiple advantages to the outsider
in search of world culture. It is uncommonly hospitable—at least to the
writer who is willing to work for his keep, who is prepared to take on the
requisite linguistic labors. A poet who desires membership in this
commu-nity does not require a distinguished pedigree. He has only to recognize
and master the possibilities of his native speech to be welcomed into an
extended poetic family. This community is, moreover, like its component
languages, a hybrid; each of its member languages is equally foreign and
equally native within its heterogeneous whole. Russian derives its vitality,
Mandelstam claims, from its very impurity, from the continuous
cross-breeding that shapes its hybrid nature. The best poetry grows, Eliot notes,
from “the struggle between native and foreign elements.” For Pound, the
“constant cross-fertilization between different languages” prevents the
“linguistic provincialism” that is the death of true culture.
41The mobile,
polyglot unity of Eliot’s or Pound’s English, like Mandelstam’s Russian,
allows for and even requires the continuous contributions of outsiders.
Their world culture is no less dependent on the generosity of strangers.
The notion of a heteregeneous poetry that draws on all cultures while
retaining its inner unity lends itself more readily to theory than to practice.
Yet the dream of such a poetry informs the very texture of the poetry
shaped by these would-be citizens of world culture. In “Conversation
about Dante,” Mandelstam celebrates “the orgy of quotations” and the
abundance of “lexical thrusts” he finds at work in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
(CPL, 401): “There is the barbarian thrust towards German hushing
sounds and Slavic cacophony; there is the Latin thrust, at times toward
Dies
irae
and
Benedictus qui venit
, at other times towards kitchen Latin. There
is the great impulse toward the speech of his native province—the Tuscan
thrust” (CPL, 446). The same multiplicity of voices and speeches informs
the poetry of Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound.
Eliot’s
Waste Land
(1922) is, of course, this century’s most famous
patchwork of poetic quotations. “These fragments I have shored against
my ruins,” Eliot mourns as his poem draws to its close. Its last stanza
mim-ics the kind of linguistic and cultural disruption that is for Eliot the
land-scape of modern culture, even as its final lines, given in the Sanskrit that is
among the oldest of all Indo-European languages, hint at a linguistic and
cultural unity that underlies “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history”:
I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
• • Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih42
Almost any page of Pound’s
Cantos, taken at random, will yield a similar
amalgam of linguistic fragments, often not just in multiple languages but in
more than one alphabet. The conclusion of Pound’s first Canto (1915/
1925) may be less conspicuously polyglot than the closing of “The Waste
Land.” As Pound begins his lifelong struggle to “write the Paradise” of a
new civilization, though, he is no less preoccupied than Eliot with the role
of language in shaping a new cultural community from the linguistic
arti-facts of the past.
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
These lines conclude Pound’s free translation of a passage from Homer’s
Odyssey, and they demonstrate the degree to which language itself becomes
the hero of Pound’s modern saga. “The language of Canto I,” as Christine
Froula notes, “is not simply a translator’s modern English version of the
ancient Greek, but folds together, ply over ply, Homer’s Greek, the Latin
of the [sixteenth century] translator, Andreas Divus, whose text mediates
between Pound and the Greek.” Past and present, foreign and native
coex-ist in a lingucoex-istic fabric that is “heavy with hcoex-istory.”
43Froula’s imagery of fabric and weaving is equally apt for Mandelstam’s
poetics of history. “I love the custom of weaving,” he writes in “Tristia”
(1918; #104), and Ovid’s ancient Rome converges with postrevolutionary
Russia in his version of the poet as weaver of histories and tongues:
Snuet helnok, vereteno 'u''it,
• •
The shuttle warps, the spindle hums, And look! like swan’s down, barefoot Delia Comes flying to meet us.
Mandelstam’s strategies for weaving his world culture into the fabric of his
verse are less flamboyant than Eliot’s or Pound’s; his borrowings seldom
take the shape of long quotations in foreign tongues complete with glosses.
The barefoot Delia Mandelstam magically summons up with his weaving
hints, though, at the ways in which he endows his Russian speech with
“inner Hellenism.” This Delia comes to him through Ovid’s
contemporar-ies Tibullus and Horace, in whose verse she appears; and her Greek and
Roman name had, moreover, already been given a Russian inflection by
Konstantin Batiushkov (1787–1855), who had translated Tibullus’ poem
on Delia over a century earlier. Mandelstam draws both the classical and
the Russian past into his web of remembered and invented culture by way
of a single name.
44An astute early critic of Mandelstam’s verse hints at the distinctiveness of
his hybrid poetic speech when he dubs it “classical transsense.”
45And
Man-delstam uses still subtler ways of weaving foreign pasts into the fabric of
modern Russian speech in other lyrics. . Let us turn here, by way of
exam-ple, to an early version of the Homer who haunts Mandelstam’s verse as
well as Pound’s:
Bessonnica. Gomer. Tugie parusa.
Q spisok korablej prohel do serediny%
Sej dlinnyj vyvodok, sej poezd 'uravlinyj,
Hto nad Ellado[ kogda-to podnqlsq.
Kak 'uravlinyj klin v hu'ie rube'ió
Na golovax carej bo'estvennaq penaó
Kuda plyvete vy?
Kogda by ne Elena,
Hto Troq vam odna, axejskie mu'i?
I more, i Gomeróvse dvi'etsq l[bov;[.
Kogo 'e slywat; mne?
I vot Gomer molhit,
I more hernoe, vitijstvuq, wumit
I s tq'kim groxotom podxodit k izgolov;[.
1915 (#79)
Sleeplessness. Homer. Taut sails.
I’ve read halfway through the list of ships: That long-drawn flock, that convoy of cranes That arose once over Hellas.
Like a wedge of cranes toward foreign borders— Divine foam on the emperors’ heads—
• •
Both the sea and Homer—all is moved by love. To whom should I listen? Homer now falls still, And the black sea rumbles, orating,
And with a heavy crash, draws up beside the bed.
Mandelstam’s brief lyric, like Pound’s first Canto, evokes both the presence
of the past and its pastness, as the events described in Homer’s writings
converge with and diverge from the experience of the modernist
poet-syn-thesizer who works to recuperate an ancient history for the modern age.
Mandelstam’s poem moves from mediation—in the poem’s opening stanza
he contemplates the
Iliad’s famous catalog of ships—to immediacy, when,
in its final lines, Homer’s wine-dark sea sweeps up along the poet’s bedside.
Mandelstam achieves this transformation through linguistic sleight of
hand, as he endows a purely Russian word with a Hellenistic soul by way of
his creative etymology. The sea itself,
móre
in Russian, is anagrammatically
concealed within Homer,
Gomér; and Homer, conversely, lies partially
hid-den in the Russian “sea,” as Mandelstam reminds us by rocking the two
words back and forth in the poem’s closing lines: “I mó-re, i Go-mér”; “I
vót Go-mér molchít/ I mó-re chérnoe
. . .” Centuries, traditions, and
linguis-tic boundaries wash away in the verbal play that gives all Russian speakers
permanent access to a Homeric past through their own sea, their
more.
Such inventive etymologies are one way into the expanded philological
family that Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound seek. In an early essay, Eliot
de-scribes another way to acquire the rich history craved by modern orphans;
and his method is one that Mandelstam and Pound energetically employ as
well. The poet works his way into a new past through what Eliot calls “a
feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with
another, probably a dead author. . . . Our friendship gives us an
introduc-tion to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its
endings; we are broadened . . . we have been quickened, and we become
bearers of a tradition.”
46He might be describing the Mandelstam who calls
François Villon his “friend and favorite,” his “favorite relation,” who “feels
himself the poet’s contemporary” (III, 23; #382; II, 307) and who
discov-ers a fellow traveler in an endlessly contemporaneous Dante obscured by
centuries of misguided criticism (CPL 410, 440).
The young Pound goes even further in his search for “mine own kind,”
“my kin of the spirit” among the poets of the past. He resurrects his absent
“soul kin” in his own flesh as he converges with distant poets recovered for
a moment from other times and places. “No man hath dared to write this
thing as yet,” he proclaims with a very young poet’s brashness in
“His-trion” ( 1908):
And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great At times pass through us,
