Osip Mandelshtam
It is midnight in Moscow, a sumptuously Buddhist summer...

It is midnight in Moscow, a sumptuously Buddhist summer.
With a fast rataplan, the streets part their ways in tight iron boots,
Coils of boulevards luxuriate in smallpox…
Moscow will not settle down even at night,
When peace flees from under the hooves…
You’ll say, two circus clowns, Bim and Bom,
Have entrenched themselves on the target range,
Haircombs and tiny hammers at work,
And you hear now a mouth organ blaring, now
A milky baby piano tinkling
Do–re–mi–fa
And so–fa–mi–re–do.

When I was younger, it used to be I’d venture
In my trusty taped-seamed rubber coat
Into the wide-branching tangle of the boulevards,
Where the gypsy girl’s match-like legs beat up a storm in her long skirt,
Where the arrested bear was on the roam,
That perpetual Menshevik of nature.
The air was swooning with odors of cherry laurels…
Where are you going? You’ve got neither laurels nor cherries…

I’ll pull on the bottle-shaped chain weight
Of our kitchen clock with its jumpy second hand.
Amazing how coarse and jagged time is,
And I yet love to catch it by the tail,
For it is not to blame for its swift running,
Though it does seem a trifle roguish, cunning…

Tut, no requests and no complaining! Hush,
No whining!
Did the old radical intelligentsia
Stomp the roads in their cracked and dried-out boots
So I’d betray them now? We’ll die like foot soldiers
But will not stoop to glorifying greed, peonage, lies.

We own the cobweb of an old Scottish plaid blanket.
You will cover me with it, as with an army banner,
Once I am dead. Let us toast then, friend, our barley grief,
Bottoms up…

The crowds, the cinema halls’ packed labor done,
Exit therefrom as if deadened by chloroform
And all grotesquely venous; they stand
In urgent need of oxygen then…

It’s time you knew I too am your contemporary:
I'm a man of the era of the Moscow Garment Trust,
Check out how my jacket bulges on me,
How I can walk, and likewise talk, not least!
Go ahead, try to rip me out of my era,
You’ll break your neck: that cause is lost!

I am conversing with my own epoch, but wonder
Whether it’s got a soul of hemp-rope. Does it
Invade our space parasitically, live on there
Like some wrinkled beastie in a Tibetan shrine
That scratches itself before leaping into the zinc bathtub?
-- The beastie act again, please, Maria Ivanovna!
Even if it is embarrassing, understand:
Love’s labor’s lust exists, it’s in our slut blood!

Dawn is breaking, the gardens lisp a green telegraph.
Meanwhile Rembrandt is visited by Raphael.
He and Mozart both adore Moscow to distraction
For her brown eyes and sparrow-hopping booze.
Here, drafts of air carry from apartment to
Apartment over a quick conveyor belt of air
As if pneumatic mail via a tube system
Or the fish jelly of Black sea jellyfish,
Like idle students in May, losing their marbles.

Translated by Philip Nikolayev