Three Poems from 1937

From 1935 to 1937, Mandelstam served out three years of internal exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, where he composed his major unpublished opus known as the Voronezh Notebooks. Mandelstam’s Voronezh poems are divided into three sections, corresponding to three distinct periods of intense poetic production. The poems featured here were written in the first months of 1937. Penned on February 12, “Dream arms my Don-Valley drowsing...” draws a connection between Stalin’s features (“eyes, brows, and head”) and the defense of the nation (they are “battle armor”). The song being sung here, which Mandelstam paraphrases in the bell-like rhythm of the penultimate line, is a chorale rendition of The Internationale, the official Soviet anthem from 1922 to 1944. In fact, The Internationale offers a key to the poem’s “message”: poetry and song transform “common words” into “obdurate, unyielding Kremlin words,” which serve as a kind of “armor,” emboldening us for the “final and decisive” battle of the anthem’s refrain, in which the working class and peasants defeat the “parasites” who exploit their labor.

In “Rome,” the screed against Mussolini and his Fascist blackshirts is as direct in its imagery as it is complex in syntax, with sentences that look and sound like water flooding over the stone steps of Rome’s plazas. Mussolini’s rule is figured as a kind of twisted revenge of “Caesars long dead,” while Mandelstam’s allegiances are, as usual, with the renaissance (Michelangelo), and with the city’s anonymous builders. Rome’s organic architecture (built by swallows) that once uplifted simple human movement (“footfalls would sound like deeds”) now languishes in a kind of perverted flaccidity, as the stone steps become “listless sponges / to indulge disfigured indulgence.” The final stanza alludes to Mussolini’s excavations of the Roman Forum and building of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, projects meant to draw propagandistic connections between the Fascist regime and Rome’s Imperial past.

Two days after “Rome,” Mandelstam wrote “So that sandstone, friend to raindrops and wind…,” a poem that contrasts the monuments built by another kind of despotic ruler—the Egyptian pharaohs—to the more lasting achievements of outsider poets, here personified by fifteenth-century poet-vagabond François Villon. Villon, for Mandelstam, is the ultimate poet because he lived for life itself (not for the afterlife), concerned with everyday troubles, in pursuit of a good meal by any means, and was completely of his time. Mandelstam’s “pittance of pyramids” echoes Villon’s satirical verses in which impermanence is a major theme. He satirizes the reliquary objects of the Ancient Egyptian ruling class and belittles their hieroglyphic markings: “storks,” or the ibis-god Thoth; “bottles inside of bottles,” probably Atef, the bottle-like crown of Osiris.

During the Cold War, and even into the present, translators and commentators have promulgated an image of Mandelstam as a poet out of touch with his era. Poems like “Rome” and “Dream arms my Don-Valley drowsing…,” among many others in the Voronezh Notebooks, make plain that, even in exile, Mandelstam kept up with current events and formulated poetic utterances in direct response to the events of his time.