Mandelstam spent eight months of 1930 in Armenia. The visit is held to have been a success, not least in bringing to an end a period of five years in which he had neither written nor published poetry or prose to any significant extent. However, I find this ‘experimental meditation’ disappointing. I had hoped for something to place alongside Vasily Grossman’s ‘An Armenian Sketchbook’ and possibly also Pushkin’s ‘Journey to Arzrum’, but apart from the obvious Armenia/Caucasus parallels there is little to compare.
Mandelstam’s happiest period seems to have been the month he spent on an island on the high altitude Lake Sevan, a body of water large enough to be readily located on any map of the region. Thus, a significant part of his account of his visit relates to the island community, the water, boats, sand and mud – giving a very different impression from Grossman’s accounts of rock and shale everywhere, with even kitchen utensils fashioned from rock.
Mandelstam professes to have enjoyed the company of Armenians – more so than Grossman, who didn’t get on with the author whose book he had been tasked to translate. Mandelstam writes:
‘There is nothing more pleasant and instructive than to immerse yourself in the society of people of an entirely different race, whom you respect, with whom you sympathize, of whom you are, though a stranger, proud.’
He lauds:
‘The Armenians’ fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things.’
He enjoys the company of ‘a whole gallery of clever, thoroughbred old men’ who had collected on Sevan, preferring ‘their quiet company and the thick black coffee of their talk to the flat conversations of the young people, which revolved, as they do everywhere, around examinations and sports.’
Apparently 70 per cent of the island population were children: Mandelstam found them wearing.
He takes the opportunity too to disparage Van Gogh’s ‘cheap vegetable pigments […] bought by calamitous accident for twenty sous.’
‘Van Gogh spits blood like a suicide in a cheap hotel….
I never saw such barking colours!
And his streetcar-conductor’s vegetable-garden landscapes! The soot of suburban trains has just been wiped from them with a wet rag.’
He dislikes too a whole string of (named) impressionist and other late 19th century and early 20th century painters, and counsels strongly against entering an art gallery ‘as if into a chapel’.
‘With a stroller’s stride, as on a boulevard – straight on!’
‘Journey to Armenia’ contains a couple of admiring references to the 13th-14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, so it is fitting that Notting Hill Editions has published a translation of Mandelstam’s rather later (1934-5) ‘Conversation about Dante’ in the same volume.
Nominally about the whole ‘Divine Comedy’, the essay concentrates, as do most, primarily on the ‘Inferno’.
Mandelstam makes the point that Dante was a poor man, a ‘raznochinets’, an intellectual not of noble birth. Throughout the ‘Divina Commedia’ Dante does not know how to behave, how to act, what to say, how to make a bow. Had he been sent out alone, without Vergil – his dolce padre – scandal would have erupted and instead of the journey among torments and remarkable sights, we would have ‘the most grotesque buffoonery’.
‘The Divina Commedia does not so much take up the reader’s time as intensify it, as in the performance of a musical piece.’
Mandelstam comments on Dante often being regarded as a sculptor:
‘Here they forget one small detail: the chisel very precisely removes all excess, and the sculptors draft leaves no material traces behind…. In poetry, in the plastic arts, and in art generally there are no ready-made things.’
Himself a poet, Mandelstam is there offering an important insight – we should attach no significance to no early drafts of the ‘Divine Comedy’ having come down to us.
He also comments insightfully on translated poetry:
‘For us foreigners it is difficult to penetrate to the ultimate secret of an alien poetry. It is not for us to judge; the last word cannot be ours.’
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Page 1 of 1 Start againPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
