Zadonsk – a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Painting: A Wooded Marsh by Jacob van Ruisdael

Introduction by Alistair Noon:

Between 1934 and 1937, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lived in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, roughly half-way between Moscow and the Black Sea and not far from the Ukraine (the local accent shares features with Ukrainian). He was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was to play a crucial role in the preservation and posthumous publication of his late work, including the poem translated below. He had been arrested and sentenced after he had written and read, at a private reading in Moscow, a poem that has become known as the Stalin Epigram. Not long after his internal exile ended, he was re-arrested and transported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938, in a Gulag transit camp.

Constantly having to change their accommodation owing to the acute shortage of housing in Voronezh, the Mandelstams were able to spend the summer of 1936 in a small town nearby called Zadonsk, after friends including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak had collected enough money for them to do so. The Mandelstams rented a room from a farmer on Karl Marx Street No. 10, outside of which stood a poplar. While there, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to painting watercolours (she had studied art in Kiev), and news of the first show trials, inaugurating the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, came over the municipal loudspeakers.

Jakob van Ruisdael (c. 1629–1682) was a Dutch landscape painter.

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“Zadonsk”

Like a vinyl-thin Gillette
that gently shaves off hibernation,
let's ruffle the memories we've kept
of that summer we lived half-Ukrainian.

Honouring Ruisdael's paintings,
you treetops whose titles are known
give dishevelled woods their saintly
name-days. One bush was a start, alone
in the amber and flesh of red loam.

That land has an upward tilt.
I was glad to see its clear layers,
be lord of the land's simplicity
I grasped in its seven chambers.

Its hills would fly to their target
far off, like loose stacks of wheat.
Across the steppe, the boulevard
laid a chain of tents in the heat.
Hotfoot to the blaze went the willow,
and the vain poplar stood up...
The stubble's camp was yellow,
the frost would steam in the rut.

And the mongrel Don, once again,
was a glittering silver, ungainly,
scooped water by the half-bowl,
then got lost – yes, that was my soul –

when the weight of evening was eased
down onto the brutal bunks,
and we heard the carousing trees
burst, like hawk-moths, from the riverbanks.

15 – 27 December 1936
Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Alistair Noon

***

Alistair Noon's translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018. His own poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. He lives in Berlin.