More from Mandelshtam

More from Mandelstam's Voronezh Notebooks.
Translation by Michael Efroimsky


May you keep and remember forever my voice for its taste of misfortune and smoke,
For its pitch and its tar, for my long humble patience and labour to death.
I wish the deep waters of Novgorod's wells were so dark, so silent and slow
That a seven-finned quivering star on the Eve of Christ Mass mirrored faintly in their depths.

And for that, oh my Father, my Comrade, my Friend, and my stern and merciless Helper,
I, the outcast seed and the prodigal brother rejected as chaff from the Sovietwealth,
Will frame the wells in such rough, coarse-grained and mossy log shelters,
That nomadic Tatars would be eager to sink Russian princes in these wells.

For I long to be loved by the scaffolds and blocks, so frozen and unrefined.
Like in kubb, when aiming for death in the garden of games.
And for this I shall walk through my life in a shirt made of iron
And I shall greet the axe of the Czar with my blood that it claims.



PS.
The translator gladly acknowledges the help and consultation by Elena Berezetsky and Eva Kukar.