Iota and theta, the flute
of the Greeks gives no recitals –
unsculptured and short of repute,
trench-crosser, it ripened and tightened.
You can’t let it out of your grip:
clench your teeth, you won’t subdue it.
You can’t pull its form from your lips.
No tongue can force words through it.
The flautist knows no rest:
he believes he’s alone, that one day
he moulded that birthplace he left,
his Aegean, from violet clay.
With a whisper from lips that love honour,
that resound and recall in whispers,
he hurrieth to practice economy
and picks out his tones, tight-fisted.
He takes steps we’ll never reprise,
just clay in the sea’s open hands,
and as soon as the sea’s at my eyes,
my counts turn into a cancer.
I don’t even love my own lips -
murder hangs too from that vine -
helpless I let the flute dip
its equinox into decline …
• Translated by Alistair Noon
While living in internal exile in Voronezh, south-west Russia, between 1934 and 37, the Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam composed around 90 poems. (As noted by Alistair Noon, the translator and editor of the new Shearsman Books edition, it can be difficult to determine what counts as a separate poem.) Although self-contained, Iota and Theta … (formally untitled, like most of the Voronezh compositions) has important neighbours: “Lush Crete’s the blue island”, “Nereids” and others from the preceding pages further orchestrate Mandelstam’s recovery of his fundamentally classical orientation.
Iota and Theta … from the Third Workbook, and dated 7 April 1937, is a response, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope , to the arrest of a German flautist the couple knew, referred to simply as “Schwab”: he was accused of spying and died in a work camp near Voronezh. Nadezhda records her husband’s repeated anxieties as to whether or not Schwab had been able to take his flute to the camp, and, if he had, whether further incriminations had been the result. These anxieties seem interlocked by the poem with Mandelstam’s recollections of his own imprisonment, torture and attempted suicide, and some profound forebodings about the approaching post-exile period.
Displayed in the art museum built in 1933 in Voronezh, the Greek earthenware included depictions of flute-players. These images, and perhaps the “ditties of no tone” remembered from Keats’ Ode, provide the silence haunting Mandelstam’s quatrains.
His deployment of consonants and vowels in the opening line seems to conjure the sound of the modern flute Shwab would have played, but another effect of singling out two particular Greek letters, is a reminder that the Greek flute, the aulos, often comprised two pipes. Mandelstam suggests both the humble informality of the instrument ( being “unsculptured”, it’s not found in the major artistic record of classical Greece), and its tenacity. The “tightening” at the end of the first stanza, and words such as “grip” and “clench” in the second inevitably suggest rigor mortis as well as defiant, intractable, bodily possession – the fight for life. Noon’s compound neologism “trench-crosser” takes the Russian word for “ditch” or “trench” into the war zone, and reminds us that the flute, in military uniform, becomes a fife. So a tune or a poem can bear fruit as a weapon.
The unknown maker of the Greek vase and the poet, the designer of his artistic “birthplace” and identity, seem entwined in the third stanza. Perhaps an old creation myth flickers behind the image, but no divine potter makes an appearance: artists mould themselves and this one has even shaped “his native sea”. The violet colour of the sea-clay suggests the “wine-dark” intensity of its blue, and perhaps an interlacing of life-blood and bloodshed in battle.
As the flautist-poet stares more deeply into his own sources of inspiration, the pressure of accountability intensifies. He “practices economy”, an artistic essential – yet his art risks starvation because to thrive it needs freedom of range. Now it’s as if the artist had become the amphora. The sea he seemed earlier to have moulded, floods and overwhelms him. Art is drowned by history. And the poet’s own history subsumes the poem grammatically when he steps into the last six lines. The economy of his art breaks down and falsehood multiplies: “my counts turn into a cancer.”
Mandelstam composed his poems by speaking them aloud, and it’s this physical act of creation that is evoked by the insistent “whispers” in stanza four and by the fatal inrush of the sea water in five. As Noon’s commentary makes clear, Mandelstam strove in certain poems to offer some reparation for the derogatory Stalin Epigram, and the internal conflict seems to shape the dialectic of the Greek flute. The poems most true to the poet himself, the most “honourable”, have the potential to incriminate and destroy him. And, in a political machine that reprieves the informer, moral suicide is the alternative hideous option. In the last stanza, the poet-flautist turns on his own lips, the essential means of delivery for one whose process of composition was so intimately connected with speech. The flute in its final form gains a cosmic dimension from the analogy with the equinox, but a limit has been reached. The poem’s last terrible gesture is of laying down an instrument that will never be picked up again.
In this poem as elsewhere Alistair Noon’s translation aims to carry over into English not only Mandelstam’s knotted density of meaning, but the metrical and assonantal effects of the original poem. The tetrameter rhythm may be quick, light, and agile like a flute, or heavy and thump-ish like clay, depending on the choice of diction. English tetrameter’s accentual instabilities add an improvisational quality – which is true to the nature of these poems. They are, to some extent, experiments – as Noon’s choice of the term “workbook” in preference to the usual “notebook” implies.
With its accompanying essay and appendix, this collection of the Voronezh Workbooks is an important contribution to Mandelstam scholarship – and to the general reader’s understanding. A collection of lighter verse by the same poet, the Occasional and Joke Poems, is published simultaneously, the generously annotated record of younger, merrier days in the poet’s life.
The Russian text of this week’s poem can be read here.
