Ode on Slate

OSIP MANDELSTAM ||||| ODE ON SLATE

 

Only by ear will we grasp

What scratched and grappled there,

Star with star mightily conjoined,

The old song’s flinty path,

Tongue of air, and tongue of flint,

Horseshoe with ring, water with flint.

The milky sketch in slate

On the clouds’ soft shale

Is no novitiate of worlds

But the delirium of drowsing sheep.

 

We stand asleep in the thick night

Beneath a warm woollen cap.

The spring babbles back to the thickets

A chainlet, a warbler, a spiel.

Fear writes here, here writes the fault line

With a milky stick of lead,

Here mellows the draft

Penned by flowing water’s disciples.

 

Steep towns of goats,

Mighty stratum of flint.

And there’s yet another ridge:

Ovine villages and churches!

The plumb line preaches to them,

Water schools them, time whets them,

And they’ve long since had their fill

Of the air’s transparent woods.

 

Like a hornet dead outside a hive,

The motley day is swept out in disgrace.

And night the vulture bears

Burning chalk and feeds the slate.

To erase the day’s impressions

From the iconoclastic icon

And brush from the arm like a chick

Visions already transparent!

 

The fruit was bursting, the grapes grew ripe.

The day raged as rage it does.

And a gentle game of knucklebones,

And vicious sheepdogs’ coats at noon.

Like debris from icy heights,

The seamy side of green icons,

The hungry water flows,

Winding, frisking like a cub.

 

And like a spider it crawls over me,

Where every joint is spattered by the moon,

In the stupefied heights

I hear the screeching of slate.

I break the night, the burning chalk,

To make a solid record of the instant.

I swap noise for the song of arrows,

I swap formation for an angry bustard.

 

Who am I? Not a righteous mason,

Nor a roofer, nor a shipwright.

I am a double dealer, and my soul is deceitful,

I’m a friend of the night, the day’s ramrod.

Blessed is he who dubbed flint

Flowing water’s disciple.

Blessed is he who cinched a belt

To solid ground on the sole of the mountains.

 

And now I’m perusing the logs

Of the leaden summer’s scratches,

Tongue of air, and tongue of flint,

Seam of darkness, seam of light.

And I want to poke my fingers

In the old song’s flinty path

As into a sore, joining

Flint with water, horseshoe with ring.

 

Source: mandelshtam.let-info.ru. Translated by the Russian Reader

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