Osip Mandelshtam
My status being still far from a patriarch’s...

My status being still far from a patriarch’s,
Of merely semi-venerable age,
I’m still badmouthed behind my back
In the language of streetcar invective,
Mindless and senseless. So and so,
That bloody rascal. Well, I’m truly sorry,
Though deep down I neither change nor worry.

Come to think of what ties you to this world,
You can’t believe yourself or those trifles!
A midnight key to a complete stranger’s flat
Next to the small silver coin in your pocket,
And a movie about thieves to go with that.

I dart like a puppy toward the telephone
At every hysterical burst of ringing,
In which I hear the Polish 'Dziękuję pane',
An out-of-towner long-distance
Reproach, or promise unfulfilled.

And all the while you’re thinking what you might yet
Grow to like among the firecrackers and fizgigs,
But once the mania passes, all that’s left
Are commotion and unemployment:
They’ll light your cigarette for you for your enjoyment!

I now chuckle, now adjust my posture shyly
Strutting out with a white-handed walking stick;
Listening to sonatas in the alleyways,
Licking my lips by every food stall,
Leafing through books in eerie back alleys,
I do not live, and yet I somehow live.

I shall go to the sparrows and reporters
And I’ll go to the street photographers
And In five minutes, spade out of bucket,
I can obtain my likeness at the foot
Of the Shah-Mountain’s conic indigo.

And on occasion I may run an errand
In steamy stuffy basements
Where cleanly and honest Chinese
Are picking up dough balls with chopsticks,
Playing a game of long narrow-sliced cards,
Knocking back vodka like swallows from the Yangtze.

I love the placid crawl of creaky tramcars,
Fresh asphalt’s Caspian black caviar
Covered with a hand-woven straw mat
Like a basket stuffed with bottles of fizzy Asti,
And ostrich plumes of reinforcement bars
At the start of a new Leninist construction project.

I enter the puppet theater of the museums
Where the ogre’s bloated Rembrandts
Give off with a gleam like that of cordovan,
I marvel at Titian’s horned miters
And at the variegated Tintoretto
for a flock of a thousand chirpy parrots.

I so wish to run wild, to talk it out,
Spill the whole truth and nothing but it, to tell
My doldrums to buzz off to smog, to hell,
And to take someone by the hand and say
to him: Be kind. We are going the same way.

Translated by Philip Nikolayev