曼德尔施塔姆《马蹄铁的发现者》
1
So make up your own minds. Without further ado:
“That forest’s for ships and masts.”
Free to their very tops from shaggy burden,
They should be creaking in storms
In the furious forestless air;
Beneath the salty heel of the wind the plumb line stands fast, fitted to the dancing deck,
In unbridled thirst for space,
The fragile tackle of a geometer,
Collates with the earth-womb’s attraction
The rugged surface of the seas.
Of tarry tears that ooze through the ship’s planking,
Riveted, arranged into bulkheads
Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter, but another –
Father of voyages, friend of the mariner –
Their tops forgetting their roots
On the well-known mountain ridge,
And they thrummed in the freshwater downpour,
Unsuccessfully offering to the sky in exchange for a pinch of salt
The air trembles from comparisons.
No word is better than another,
Garishly harnessed to bird flocks dense with effort,
Competing with the snorting favorites of the hippodromes.
Thrice blessed is whoever places a name in a song;
A song that’s ornamented with a name
She is marked out among her friends by a band on her forehead
That cures one of unconsciousness, of a too strong stupefying smell –
Whether it is the proximity of a man,
Or the smell of the hair of a strong beast,
Or simply the breath of savory rubbed between the palms.
The air is sometimes dark as water, and everything that lives in it swims like a fish,
With fins pushing aside the sphere,
Dense, springy, barely warmed –
A crystal within which wheels move and horses shy,
The humid black earth of Néère, each night turned up anew
By pitchforks, tridents, hoes, and plows.
The air is kneaded as dense as earth –
It’s impossible to leave, and hard to enter.
A rustle runs through the trees like a green ballgame;
Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile chronology of our era comes to an end.
I myself made mistakes, got mixed up, lost count.
The era rang like a golden ball,
Hollow, molded, supported by no one,
At every touch it answered “yes” and “no.”
“I’ll give you the apple” or “I won’t give you the apple,”
His face an exact cast of the voice that pronounces those words.
The sound rings still, though the reason for the sound has vanished.
The steed lies in the dust and snorts in its lather,
But the sharp bend of its neck
Still preserves the memory of running with scattered legs,
When they were not four in number
But as many as the stones in the road,
As many times as an ambler radiating heat thrusts back the earth.
And rubs it with animal hair until it shines;
He hangs it over the threshold
And no longer will it have to strike sparks from flint.
Human lips that no longer have anything to say
Preserve the form of the word they last said,
And in the hand remains the sensation of weight,
has splashed out half its water
while they were carrying it home.
That which I am saying now is not said by me,
But dug out of the earth like grains of fossilized wheat.
Multifarious copper, gold, and bronze lozenges
With identical honor lie in the earth.
The age, trying to bite through them,
Has printed on them its teeth.
And there’s no longer enough of me for myself…