OSIP MANDELSTAM - POEM - 1924

No, never. I wasn’t anyone’s contemporary.
That sort of honor doesn’t fit.
Oh, how I hate the one who shared my name,
That wasn't me. That was someone else.

This despotic age has two sleepy eyeballs
And an exquisite mouth of clay,
But, kissing the languid hand of his aging son,
He will, dying, fall.

And with the age, I lifted my fevered eyelids
Two great sleepy eyeballs,
And raging rivers recited
The course of inflamed human strife.

A hundred years ago on white cushions,
On a simple folding bed,
Strangely stretching out its clay body,
The age ended its first drunken spree.

Beneath the world's screeching advance,
What a frail bed!
Well, too bad. If we can't make another,
We'll live our lives on this.

And in a stifling room, in a stage coach, in a nomad tent,
The age is dying- And afterwards
Two sleepy eyeballs on a plate of horn
Will blaze, becoming feathers of flame.

*

Translation by Deborah Marshall
& Douglas Penick

In honor of Jessie Friedman and Jules Levinson