Issue 7: Alistair Noon, Mandelstam

To the German Language

It’s my contradiction and disadvantage:

like a moth to a chink of light at midnight,

I feel some urge to leave our language

and all the things there I’m tied to.

There’s praise without flattery between us,

no hypocrisy, we’re the closest of friends...

But let’s learn some respect and how to be serious

from a family of strangers in the West.

Storms are fantastic for poetry!

I recall one Kapitän, how the hilt

of his sword was tangled with roses,

and the name of Ceres lay on his lips...

In Frankfurt, fathers were still yawning,

and no one had heard of Goethe just yet.

Hymns were composed, and horses

pranced and leapt on the spot, like letters.

Tell me, my friends, in what Valhalla

did we sit together and crack nuts?

What kind of freedom was it we had?

Which of my landmarks did you construct?

Straight out of an almanac’s pages

of first class news, unafraid, they ran

down the steps and into the grave,

as if to fetch Mosel by the tankard.

A foreign language will be my cover.

Before I dared to be born, I was a letter,

I was a trellis from which grapes hung,

I was the book that you dreamt of.

With no form or order, I slept

until friendship woke me like a shot.

Give me the fate of Pylades, or rip

my useless tongue out, Nachtigallgott.

They’ll still recruit me, nightingale god,

for seven years’ wars and new pestilence.

Words will spit and stamp, sounds taper off,

but you’re alive, and you and I are at rest.

8 – 12 August 1932

NOTES:

• B.C. Kuzin. Biologist met and  befriended by Mandelstam on his 1930 trip to Armenia.

• Ewald Christian Kleist (1715-1759): German poet. The quotation reads: ‘Friend, don’t miss out on life: / the years are flying on, / and the juice from the vines / will not warm us long.’

Alistair Noon's first full-length collection is Earth Records, forthcoming from Nine Arches Press in 2012. His poems, reviews, essays and translations from German and Russian have appeared widely in magazines and several chapbooks, most recently Out of the Cave (Calder Wood). He is currently preparing a full-length collection of translations of Osip Mandelstam, and lives in Berlin.

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