Marina Tsvetaeva
Poem of the mountain

Liebster, Dich wundert
die Rede? Alle Scbeidenden
reden wie Trunkene und
nehmen sich festlich...
— Hölderlin

A shudder: off my shoulders
    with this mountain! My soul rises.
Now let me sing of sorrow which
    is my own mountain

a blackness which I will
    never block out again:
Let me sing of sorrow
    from the top of the mountain!

1

A mountain, like the body of
a recruit mown down by shells,
wanting lips that were
unkissed, and a wedding ceremony

the mountain demanded those.
Instead, an ocean broke into its ears
with sudden shouts of hooray! Though
the mountain fought and struggled.

The mountain was like thunder!
A chest drummed on by Titans.
(Do you remember that last house
of the mountain — the end of the suburb?)

The mountain was many worlds!
And God took a high price for one.
Sorrow began with a mountain.
This mountain looked on the town.

2

Not Parnassus not Sinai
simply a bare and military
hill. Form up! Fire!
Why is it then in my eyes
(since it was October and not May)
that mountain was Paradise?

3

On an open hand Paradise was offered,
(if it’s too hot, don’t even touch it!)
threw itself under our feet with all
its gullies and steep crags,

with paws of Titans, with all
its shrubbery and pines
the mountain seized the skirts of our
coats, and commanded: stop.

How far from schoolbook Paradise
it was: so windy, when
the mountain pulled us down on our
backs. To itself. Saying: lie here!

The violence of that pull bewildered us.
How? Even now I don’t know.
Mountain. Pimp. For holiness.
It pointed, to say: here.

4

How to forget Persephone’s pomegranate
grain in the coldness of winter?
I remember lips half-opening to
mine, like the valves of a shell-creature

lost because of that grain, Persephone!
Continuous as the redness of lips,
and your eyelashes were like jagged points
upon the golden angles of a star.

5

Not that passion is deceitful or imaginary!
It doesn’t lie. Simply, it doesn’t last!
If only we could come into this world as though
we were common people in love

be sensible, see things as they are: this
is just a hill, just a bump in the ground.
(And yet they say it is by the pull of
abysses, that you measure height.)

In the heaps of gorse, coloured dim
among islands of tortured pines...
(In delirium above the level of
life)
      — Take me then. I’m yours.

Instead only the gentle mercies of
domesticity — chicks twittering —
because we came down into this world who
once lived at the height of heaven: in love.

6

The mountain was mourning (and mountains do mourn,
their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).
The mountain mourned: for the tenderness
(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.

The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for
that unbreakable kinship of the lips.
The mountain declared that everyone will
receive in proportion to his tears.

The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy-camp,
and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.
And this was Hagar’s grief. To be
sent far away. Even with her child.

Also the mountain said that all things were a trick
of some demon, no sense to the game.
The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent,
leaving the mountain to judge the case.

7

The mountain mourned for what is now blood
and heat will turn only to sadness.
The mountain mourned. It will not let us go.
It will not let you lie with someone else!

The mountain mourned, for what is now
world and Rome will turn only to smoke.
The mountain mourned, because we shall be with
others. (And I do not envy them!)

The mountain mourned: for the terrible load
of promises, too late for us to renounce.
The mountain mourned the ancient nature of
the Gordian knot of law and passion.

The mountain mourned for our mourning also.
For tomorrow! Not yet! Above our foreheads
will break — death’s sea of — memories!
For tomorrow, when we shall realize!

That sound what? as if someone were
crying just nearby? Can that be it?
The mountain is mourning. Because we must go down
separately, over such mud,

into life which we all know is nothing but
mob market barracks:
That sound said: all poems of
mountains are written thus

8

Hump of Atlas, groaning
    Titan, this town where we
live, day in, day out, will come
    to take a pride in the mountain

where we defeated life — at cards, and
    insisted with passion not to
exist. Like a bear-pit.
    And the twelve apostles.

Pay homage to my dark cave,
    (I was a cave that the waves entered).
The last hand of the card game was
    played, you remember, at the edge of the suburb?

Mountain many worlds the
    gods take revenge on their own likeness!

And my grief began with this mountain
which sits above me now like my headstone.

9

Years will pass. And then the inscribed
slab will be changed for tombstone and removed.
There will be summerhouses on our mountain.
Soon it will be hemmed in with gardens,

because in outskirts like this they say
the air is better, and it’s easier to live:
so it will be cut into plots of land,
and many lines of scaffolding will cross it.

They will straighten my mountain passes.
All my ravines will be upended.
There must be people who want to bring happiness
into their home, to have happiness.

Happiness at home! Love without fiction.
Imagine: without any stretching of sinews.
I have to be a woman and endure this!
(There was happiness — when you used to come,

happiness — in my home.) Love without any extra
sweetness given by parting. Or a knife.
Now on the ruins of our happiness
a town will grow: of husbands and wives.

And in that same blessed air, while
you can, everyone should sin —
soon shopkeepers on holidays
will be chewing the cud of their profits,

thinking out new levels and corridors, as
everything leads them back to their house!
For there has to be someone who needs
a roof with a stork’s nest!

10

Yet under the weight of these foundations
the mountain will not forget the game.
Though people go astray they must remember.
And the mountain has mountains of time.

Obstinate crevices and cracks remain;
in summer homes, they’ll realize, too late,
this is no hill, overgrown with families, but
a volcano! Make money out of that!

Can vineyards ever hold the danger
of Vesuvius? A giant without fear cannot
be bound with flax. And the delirium
of lips alone has the same power:

to make the vineyards stir and turn heavily,
to belch out their lava of hate.
Your daughters shall all become prostitutes
and all your sons turn into poets!

You shall rear a bastard child, my daughter!
Waste your flesh upon the gypsies, son!
May you never own a piece of fertile land
you who take your substance from my blood.

Harder than any cornerstone, as
binding as the words of a dying man,
I curse you: do not look for happiness
upon my mountain where you move like ants!

At some hour unforeseen, some time unknowable,
you will realize, the whole lot of you, how
enormous and without measure is
the mountain of God’s seventh law.

Epilogue

There are blanks in memory cataracts
on our eyes; the seven veils.
I no longer remember you separately
as a face but a white emptiness

without true features. All — is a
whiteness. (My spirit is one
uninterrupted wound.) The chalk of
details must belong to tailors!

The dome of heaven was built in a single frame
and oceans are featureless a mass of
drops that cannot be distinguished. You
are unique. And love is no detective.

Let now some neighbour say whether your
hair is black or fair, for he can tell.
I leave that to physicians or watchmakers.
What passion has a use for such details?

You are a full, unbroken circle, a
whirlwind or wholly turned to stone.
I cannot think of you apart from
love. There is an equals sign.

(In heaps of sleepy down, and falls of
water, hills of foam, there is
a new sound, strange to my hearing,
instead of I a regal we)

and though life’s beggared now and
narrowed into how things are
still I cannot see you joined to
anyone: a
                 revenge of memory.

Translated by Elaine Feinstein