Osip Mandelshtam
Still far from patriarch or sage...

Still far from patriarch or sage,
I’m still a half-respected age.
I still get cursed behind my back
In the savage tongue of tramcar rows,
Possessed of neither rhyme nor sense:
“What a so-and-so!” Oh, I apologize
But in my heart don’t mend my ways...

If you think, you’d not believe yourself,
What ties you to the world is rubbish:
A midnight key to someone’s flat,
A silver coin in your pocket,
And the celluloid of a detective film.

I rush like a puppy to the phone
Every hysterical time it rings
A Polish voice saying: “Tzank-you, Sur,” —
A soft reproach from another town,
Some obligation unfulfilled.

You wonder what you dare to like
Amid these tricks and fireworks —
You boil over: but it won’t go away —
The meddling hands of idleness—
Please get a light from them, not me.

I sometimes laugh and sometimes try to play
The gentlemen with white-handled walking stick—
I hear sonatas in alleyways,
I lick my lips at hawkers’ trays,
I leaf through books in blocky entranceways
And do not live, yet seem to live.

I'll visit reporters and sparrows,
I’ll go to a street photographer:
In no time he’ll fish from a bucket,
An adequate likeness of me
Against Shah Mountain’s lilac cone.

And sometimes I run off on errands
To airless cellars filled with steam,
Where Chinamen, honest and clean,
Use chopsticks to pick at paste balls,
Play with cards cut in narrow pieces
And drink vodka, like swallows from the Yangtze:

And I love the squeaking trams’ departures
And the asphalt’s Astrakhan caviar,
All covered in strawlike matting,
That recall the baskets of Asti,
And ostrich fans of building-yard junk
When Leninist houses first rise.

I enter puppet-theater museums,
Where opulent Rembrandts swell,
Glazed like Cordova leather;
I marvel at Titian’s horned miters
And Tintoretto’s bright tints I admire
For their myriad screaming parakeets...

But how I’d love to speak my mind,
To play the fool, to spit out truth,
Send spleen to the dogs, to the devil, to hell,
Take someone’s arm and say: “Be so kind,
I think your way lies the same as mine.”

Translated by Bernard Meares