Osip Mandelshtam
The Unknown Soldier

1

Let this air here be a witness
to his distant, pounding heart
out in the trenches — all-seeing, hungry air:
ocean without a window, matter.

Those stars — how inquisitive
their looks at all times — but why inquire
into the downfall of the judge and witness,
into an ocean without a window, matter?

The heavy-booted sower aches in his joints
from the rain, the nameless manna,
the forest of crosses dotting
the ocean like a suicide battalion.

The thin, cold people will kill,
or they will starve, or they will freeze to the wires.
The unknown soldier expatiates on his rest
in the unknown graves.

Oh thin little swallow who has all
but forgotten how to fly, teach me
how to handle this airy grave,
without wings, without a rudder.

Ah, Michael Lermontov killed for sport!
I'll give you a strict accounting,
tell how huddled flesh is broken by the grave,
by an ocean without a window, matter.

2

These worlds go on proscribing us,
as they rustle through their frost-killed vineyards,
as they hover like a mirage of golden, stolen Meccas,
taletelling children,
wet, poisonous berries,
crashing pavilions or stars —
like the golden fat of the stars.

3

Through the ether measured in decimals,
light-time congeals to one beam,
the numbers grow transparent with pain,
a mothlike summation of zeros.

Beyond this battlefield, a field, then fields —
like a triangular flight of cranes,
the news flies ahead on its lighted beam of dust.
Everything is lit up by yesterday's casualties.

Napoleon, the small star of Austerlitz,
has wizened in his black oystershell;
the Mediterranean swallow squints,
the infected sand of Egypt sinks back to Nile.

The news flies ahead on its lighted beam of dust,
says, "I am not Waterloo, Leipzig,
the Battle of the Nations.
I am something novel that will light the world."

4

The Arabian fireworks flutter like mixed horse food,
light-time congeals to one beam,
a single bayonet pushed by oblique footsteps,
stuck like a hair on my retina.

A million men killed at knockdown prices
have serviced the trail to nothingness —
good night to them, my best wishes
from these mass graves of mammoth molehills.

The sky over these trenches is the incorruptible
Robespierre fed on important deaths;
my lips kiss nothingness...
Out of you, after you, O high-priced sky!

Over the shell holes, the earth masses, and the trenches
where the unknown soldier lagged a little in the dark,
hunches the genius of nothingness,
frowning, infected, humiliated.

5

How beautifully the butchered infantry sings,
how beautifully the night sings,
over the thick smile of Good Soldier Schweik,
over Don Quixotes frail bird leg of a lance,
over the birdlike rushes of the robber barons.
The cripple makes friends with the runner,
both will have work enough on their hands,
and the crutches beat with the dry clatter
of rain against the century’s caterpillar wheels —
this is friendship... all over the world.

6

Is this why the skull develops
such an imposing dome — a handbreadth and a hand-breadth?
Are the beloved eyes opened
as a breakthrough for the battalions?
The skull grows pompous with life —
a handbreadth and another handbreadth.

Its suture is as neat as a zipper.
It rises like Santa Sophia, the Dome,
rounded with thought, the self of its dream,
mosaic of the stars,
the cup of cups, the homeland of homelands,
the cap of joy, bald Shakespeare’s father.

7

Clarity and its possibility of outline
are pricked with red. Things run home,
and the sky swarms with their disappearance
whitening with lazy afterlight.

The only shell hole ahead of us is miscalculation,
only the superfluous is close to us.
We fight for the everyday air,
this glory should not sen e as an example.

We hold our consciousness in reserve,
day-by-day life is half dead —
is it really me finishing this drink,
eating my own head toasting on the grill?

The dress shirt of joy is starched with our blood,
the stars are pricked in red.
Night, stepmother of those herds of stars,
hear what is, what will be!

8

The aortas fill with blood,
and a dull grumble rises from the ranks:
“I was born in ninety-four.”
“I was born in ninety-two.”
Along with the others I too crumple
the used-up year of my birth in my fist.
My blood leaves my throat dry.
I murmur, “I was born on a January night
in the year ninety-one,
unenviable year, unenviable century,
my barbed wire of fire.”

Translated by Robert Lowell