Delightful—the Christopher-Columbus brilliance of Linnaeus’ monkey house.
It is Adam passing out certificates of merit to the mammals, aided by a Baghdad magician and a monk from China.
The Persian miniature has a slanted, frightened, graceful almond eye.
Sensual without sin, it convinces one like nothing else that life is a precious gift, inalienable.
I love the Moslem enamels and cameos!
Pursuing my simile, I would say: the beauty’s burning, equine eye descends to the reader, gracious and aslant. The charred cabbage-stumps of the manuscripts crunch like Sukhum tobacco.
How much blood has been spilt on account of these touch-me-nots!16 How conquerors enjoyed them!
Leopards have the sly ears of punished schoolboys.
The weeping willow, having rolled itself up into a globe, flows and swims.
Adam and Eve hold counsel, dressed in the latest paradisial fashion.
The horizon has been abolished. There is no perspective. A charming slowness of wit. The vixen’s noble ascent of the stairs, and the feeling that the gardener is leaning against the landscape and the architecture.
Yesterday I was reading Firdousi and it seemed to me that a bumblebee was sitting on the book sucking it.
In Persian poetry ambassadorial winds blow out of China bearing gifts.
It scoops up longevity with a silver ladle and endows whoever might desire it with millennia by threes and fives. That is why the rulers of the Djemdjid dynasty are as long-lived as parrots.
After having been good for an incredibly long time, Firdousi’s favorites suddenly for no reason at all become scoundrels, solely in obedience to the author’s luxuriously arbitrary fancy.
The earth and the sky in the book of Shahnama are afflicted with goiter—they are delightfully exophthalmic.
I got the Firdousi from the State Librarian of Armenia, Mamikon Artemevich Gevorkian. I was brought a whole stack of little blue volumes—eight, I think. The words of the noble prose translation—it was the French version of Von Mohl—breathed a fragrance of attar of roses. Chewing his drooping gubernatorial lip, with the unpleasant voice of a camel, Mamikon sang me a few lines in Persian.
Gevorkian is eloquent, clever, and courteous, but his erudition is altogether loud and pushy, and his speech fat, like a lawyer’s.
Readers are forced to satisfy their curiosity right there in the director’s office, under his personal supervision, and books that are placed on that satrap’s table take on a taste of pink pheasant’s meat, bitter quails, musky venison, and cunning hare.
ASHTARAK17
I managed to observe the clouds performing their devotions to Ararat.
It was the descending-ascending motion of cream poured into a glass of ruddy tea, dispersing in all directions like curly-puffed tubers.
And yet the sky in the land of Ararat gives little pleasure to the Lord of Sabaoth; it was invented by a titmouse in the spirit of most ancient atheism.
Coachman’s Mountain,18 glittering with snow, a small field, sown as if for some mocking purpose with stone teeth, the numbered barracks of construction sites and a tin can jammed with passengers—there you have the outskirts of Erevan.
And suddenly—a violin, divided up into gardens and houses, broken up into a system of terraced shelves, with crossbars, interceptors, dowels, and bridges.
The village of Ashtarak hung on the purling of the water as on a wire frame. The little stone baskets that were its gardens would make the finest gift for a coloratura at a charity performance.
A place to spend the night was found in a large four-bedroom house that had belonged to some dispossessed kulaks. The collective farm administration had scattered its furniture and set it up as the village guesthouse. On a terrace that might have given refuge to all the seed of Abraham a milky washstand was grieving.
The orchard was a dancing class for trees. The schoolgirl shyness of the apple trees, the vermilion competence of the cherries . . . Look at their quadrilles, their ritornelli and rondeaux.
I was listening to the purling of the kolkhoz accounts. In the mountains a drenching rain slanted through, and the abysses of the street gutters ran more swiftly than usual.
The water rang and welled up on all the floor-levels and terraced shelves of Ashtarak—permitting the camel to pass through the eye of the needle.
I have received your eighteen-page letter, completely covered in a hand straight and tall as an avenue of poplars, and to it I answer:
First sensual encounter with the material of an old Armenian church.
The eye searches for a form, an idea, expects it; but stumbles instead on the moldy bread of nature or on a stone pie.
The teeth of your vision crumble and break when you look for the first time at Armenian churches.
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled word, the layers of air in the semivowels. But is that all there is to its charm? No! Where does its traction come from? How to explain it? Make sense of it?
I felt the joy of pronouncing sounds forbidden to Russian lips, secret sounds, outcast, and perhaps, on some deep level, shameful.
There was some fine water boiling in a pewter teapot and suddenly a pinch of marvelous black tea was thrown into it.
That’s how I felt about the Armenian language.
I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.
Now, no matter where I might be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me.
The little church in Ashtarak is of the most ordinary kind and, for Armenia, submissive. It is a little church in a six-sided headdress with a rope ornament along the cornices of the roof and the same sort of stringy eyebrows over the meager mouths of its chinklike windows.
The door is quieter than water, lower than grass. I stood on tiptoe and glanced inside: but there was a cupola in there, a cupola!
A real one! Like the one in St. Peter’s in Rome, above the thronged thousands, the palms, the sea of candles, and the Pope’s sedan chair.
There the recessed spheres of the apses sing like seashells. There we have the four bakers: north, west, south, and east, who, their eyes plucked out, knock into the funnel-shaped niches, rummage about the hearths and the spaces between the hearths and find no place for themselves.
Whose idea was it to imprison space inside this wretched cellar, this beggars’ dungeon—in order to render it there a homage worthy of the psalmist?
When the miller can’t sleep, he goes out bareheaded to inspect his millstones. Sometimes I wake up at night and check on the conjugations in Marr’s grammar.
The teacher Ashot is immured in his flat-walled house like the unfortunate character in Victor Hugo’s novel.
Having tapped his finger on the case of his sea-captain’s barometer, he would go out into the courtyard that led to the reservoir and plot the precipitation curve on a chart of graph paper.
He worked a small-scale orchard of a tenth of a hectare, a tiny garden baked into the stone-grape pie of Ashtarak, and had been excluded from the kolkhoz as an extra mouth to feed.
In a hollow space in his bureau he kept a university degree, a high-school diploma, and a wishy-washy packet of water-color sketches, innocent hallmark of his character and talent.
In him was the hum of the past imperfect.
Hard worker in a black shirt, theatrically open at the neck, with a heavy fire in his eyes, he retired into the perspective of historical painting, in the direction of the Scottish martyrs, the Stuarts.
A story has yet to be written about the tragedy of semieducation. I think the biography of the village teacher might well become the coffee-table book of our day, as Werther once was.
Ashtarak, a rich, snugly nested settlement, is older than many European cities. It was celebrated for its harvest festivals and for the songs of the Ashugs. People who grow up close to vineyards are fond of women, sociable, skeptical, and tend t
o be touchy and idle. The people of Ashtarak are no exception.
Three apples fell from heaven: the first for the one who told the tale, the second for the one who listened, and the third for the one who understood. That is the way most Armenian fairy tales end. Many of them were written down in Ashtarak. This region is the folkloric granary of Armenia.
ALAGEZ
What tense do you want to live in?
“I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in the what ought to be.’”
That’s the way I’d like to breathe. That’s what pleases me. There is such a thing as mounted, bandit-band, equestrian honor. That is why I like the splendid Latin “gerundive”—that verb on horseback.
Yes, the Latin genius, when it was young and greedy, created that form of imperative verbal traction as the prototype of our whole culture, and it was not merely “that which ought to be,” but “that which ought to be praised”—laudatura est—that which pleases . . .
Such was the talk I carried on with myself as I rode horseback among the natural boundaries, the nomads’ territories and the gigantic pastures of Alagez.
In Erevan, Alagez had stuck out in front of my eyes like “hello” or “goodbye.” I saw how its snowy crown melted from one day to the next and how in good weather, especially in the morning, its tinted cliffs crunched like dry toast.
And I felt drawn to it, over the mulberry trees and the earthen roofs of the houses.
A piece of Alagez lived right there with me in the hotel. For some reason, a heavy specimen of the black volcanic glasslike mineral called “obsidian” lay on the window sill. A fifty-pound calling card left behind by some geological expedition.
The approaches to Alagez are not fatiguing, and it is no trouble at all on horseback, in spite of its fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The lava is contained in earthen blisters, along which one rides easily.
From the window of my fifth-floor room in the Erevan hotel, I had formed a completely wrong notion of Alagez. I thought it was a monolithic ridge. Actually, it is a system of folds and develops gradually—proportionately to the rise, the accordion of diorite rock uncoiled itself like an alpine waltz.
And a spacious day it was that fell to my lot!
Even now, as I think back on it, my heart skips a beat. I got tangled up in it as in a long shirt extracted from one of the suitcases of my ancestor Jacob.
The village of Biurakan is known for its baby-chick hunt. They rolled about the floor like little yellow balls, doomed to be sacrificed to our cannibal appetite.
We were joined in the school by a wandering carpenter, an experienced and adroit man. Taking a swig of cognac, he told us he had no use for either artels or labor unions. He said his hands were made of gold, and he was respected and could find a place anywhere. He needed no labor exchange to find a customer: by smell and by rumor he could guess where his work was needed.
Seems he was Czech by birth, and the Pied Piper.
In Biurakan I bought a large clay saltcellar, on account of which I had a lot of trouble later.
Imagine a crude Easter-cake mold—a peasant woman in farthingale or hoop skirt, with a feline head and a big round mouth right in the middle of her robe into which you could easily thrust your whole hand.
It was a lucky find from what was, by the way, a rich family of such objects. But the symbolic power with which some primitive imagination had invested it had not escaped even the casual attention of the townsmen.
Everywhere there were peasant women with weeping faces, shuffling movements, red eyelids, and cracked lips. They had an ugly way of walking, as if they had the dropsy or had strained a tendon. They moved like hills of weary rags, stirring up the dust with their hems.
The flies eat the children, gathering in clusters at the corners of their eyes.
The smile of an elderly Armenian peasant woman is inexplicably fine—there is so much nobility in it, exhausted dignity, and a kind of solemn, married charm.
The horses walk among divans, step on the pillows, wear out the shafts. You ride along feeling you have an invitation from Tamerlane in your pocket.
I saw the tomb of a giant Kurd of fabulous dimensions and accepted it as normal.
The lead horse minted rubles with her hoofs and her prodigality knew no bounds.
From the pommel of my saddle dangled an unplucked chicken, killed that morning in Biurakan.
Once in a while my horse would bend down to the grass, and its neck expressed its allegiance to the Standpats, a people older than the Romans.
A milky quietude ensued. The whey of silence curdled. The curds of the bells and the cranberries of the harness bells of various calibers muttered and clashed. Near every wellyard the karakul committee proceeded with its meeting. It seemed as if dozens of small circus owners had pitched their tents and show booths on the louse-bitten hill and, unprepared for the full house, taken unawares, swarmed about in their camps, clattering their dairy dishes, cramming the lambs into their lair, and rushing to lock up for their night in oxrealm the world-weary, steaming damp heads of cattle, distributing them among their stalls in Bay City.
Armenian and Kurdish camps do not differ in their arrangements. They are cattle-breeders’ settlements on the terraces of Alagez, stopovers for villas, laid out in carefully chosen places.
Stone markers indicate the floor plan of the tent and the small adjoining yard with its heaped wall of dung. Abandoned or unoccupied camps look as if they had been burnt out.
The guides from Biurakan were glad to stop overnight in Kamarlu: they had relatives there.
A childless old couple received us for the night into the bosom of their tent.
The old woman moved and worked with weepy, withdrawing, blessing motions as she prepared a smoky supper and some felt strips for bedding.
“Here, take the felt! Grab a blanket . . . Tell us something about Moscow.”
Our hosts got ready for bed. An oil wick lit up the tent, making it seem high as a railroad station. The wife took out a coarse army nightshirt and put it on her husband.
I felt as shy as if I were in a palace.
1. The body of Arshak19 is unwashed and his beard has run wild.
2. The king’s fingernails are broken, and the wood lice crawl over his face.
3. His ears have grown dull with silence, but once they listened to Greek music.
4. His tongue is scabby from jailers’ food, but there was a time when it pressed grapes against the roof of his mouth and was adroit as the tip of a flutist’s tongue.
5. The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is as sparse as the bleating of a sheep.
6. King Shapukh20—thinks Arshak—has got the better of me, and, worse than that, he has taken my air21 for himself.
7. The Assyrian grips my heart.
8. He is the commander of my hair and my fingernails. He grows me my beard and swallows me my spit, so accustomed has he grown to the thought that I am here, in the fortress of Aniush.
9. The Kushan people rebelled against Shapukh.
10. They broke through the border at an undefended place, as through a silken cord.
11. The Kushan attack pricked and disturbed King Shapukh, like an eyelash in his eye.
12. Both the sides (enemies) squinted, so as not to see each other.
13. A certain Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, was in the center of Shapukh’s army, encouraged the commander of the cavalry, wormed his way into his master’s favor, snatched him, like a chessman, out of danger, and all the while remained in full view.
14. He was governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak, in his velvet voice, used to give orders.
15. Yesterday he was king but today he has fallen into a fissure, has scrunched himself into a belly like a baby, and he warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.
16. When the time came for his reward Darmastat inserted into the Assyrian’s ears a request that tickled like a feath
er:
17. Give me a pass to Aniush Fortress. I would like Arshak to spend one additional day, full of hearing, taste, and smell, as it was before, when he amused himself at the hunt or busied himself with the planting of trees.
Sleep is easy in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out, recalls the length of the road. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures, walls you in. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge.
Notes
Introduction: Friends and Enemies of the Word
1. “The Word and Culture.”
The reader without Russian wishing to learn something about Mandelstam will find the following works indispensible: Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; this is the first volume of what promises to be a two-volume critical biography of Mandelstam; it contains a number of sensitive translations and exegeses of his poems—it was Brown’s intention that his book serve as an anthology as well—and some of the critical essays; unfortunately, it stops as of 1928); Brown’s edition of The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; contains Mandelstam’s only “novella” and his fictionalized autobiographical works); Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970) and Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974) (Mandelstam’s widow’s two books of memoirs, still the most authoritative source on his life and attitudes to life and poetry); and her single venture into interpretive criticism, Mozart and Salieri, trans. R. A. McLean (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1973; the title is from a short play by Pushkin, on which Mandelstam himself had commented); the two volumes that I edited, with introductions and notes, published in the series Russian Literature in Translation by the State University of New York Press: Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1972), and Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany, 1973; contains, in addition to a long interpretive essay that is the companion of the present one, two chapters from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs that did not appear in the English translation cited above); a recent issue of Soviet Studies in Literature, 9, no. 4 (Fall 1973), which includes Soviet writing on Mandelstam, ranging from the “apologetic” introduction by Alexander Dymshits to the truncated Soviet edition of Mandelstam’s poems, to the perceptive and subtle essay by Lidia Ginzburg; Arthur A. Cohen, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: an Essay in Antiphon (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1974), which takes up the complex question of Mandelstam’s Jewishness and its relation to his Christianity.
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