NYRB June 10, 2010

Reading Mandelstam on Stalin
José Manuel Prieto

EPIGRAM AGAINST STALIN

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin's mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers
slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.

Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.

Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight. 

-Translated by Esther Allen from Jose Manuel Prieto's Spanish version*

*The Russian and Spanish texts of the poem appear online at www.nybooks .com.

Strongman

MICHA LAZARUS

đọc

Robert Littell
THE STALIN EPIGRAM
304pp. Duckworth Overlook. £14.99. 9780715639030 

In November 1933, Osip Mandelstam composed what would become known as "The Stalin Epigram", a sixteen-line poem openly critical of the "Kremlin mountaineer", the "murderer and peasant-slayer", Joseph Stalin. In May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested for "countertenor activity" and interrogated for two weeks, but was miraculously spared execution or imprisonment following an edict from on high to "isolate and preserve". He and his wife, Nadezhda, spent three years sentenced to exile from major cities, and lived peripatetically among friends and around Moscow for a further year on their return. In May 1938, however, Osip was arrested once more, and sentenced to a camp for five years. Shipped to Vladivostok, he was able to send a single note to his brother requesting "proper clothes"; he did not survive the winter. Nadezhda outlived him by forty-two years, eventually reconstituting much of his poetry from memory.
Such details became known in the West largely thanks to Nadezhda's magnificent memoir, Hope Against Hope (1970). An admirer of that book, Robert Littell met Mrs Mandelstam in 1979, towards the end of her life, a meeting he describes in the epilogue to The Stalin Epigram. The novel reconstructs the events of the four years from Mandelstam's composition of the "epigram" to his death by means of a fictionalized· version of the contemporary voices of Osip and Nadezhda and their close friends Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and the wholly fictional voices of Stalin's chief bodyguard, a beautiful young actress connected to the Mandelstam, and a sweet-natured weightlifting champion and circus strongman whose experiences of Stalinist criminal justice are compared to those of the highly strung and sensitive Osip.
Most of the story takes place around the time of Mandelstam's first arrest. The couple's poetic creativity and sexual liberality are set against the destructive and repressive Soviet bureaucracy, driven by a Stalin who is more physically decayed each time he appears. Littell doesn't stray far from the memoirs: his embroidery adds color and pace to a story much of whose imperturbable horror derives from the banality of the state machinery.
Color and pace, however, oddly lessen that horror. In order to translate from memoir to novel, Littell situates at the thematic centre of the novel a conflict between the sword and the pen, Stalin's steel mortality and Mandelstam's poetic immortality.
The connection between the two, who in reality never met, is elaborated in fictional sequences of half-lucid delusions experienced by Mandelstam under duress. This is all very well for a story familiarly structured around agency and personality, protagonist, antagonist, tragic arc and fatal flaw; as such, Littell' s version is a swift and engaging piece of fiction. But the macabre pressure of the times is lifted in his account, as the bureaucratic impersonality of events is transformed into a straightforward battle of wills.
The novel thus squanders the opportunity offered by historical fiction to vivify the past and populate its silences. The "voices" here shift uncomfortably between intimacy and expository formality, and sound artificial; the fictional characters imaginatively recreate the events from multiple perspectives, but (with the exception of Fikrit, the strongman) are too typical to add much. "You have to have lived through the thirties to understand", says Akhmatova in the novel, "and even then you don't understand." Perhaps this is true, although Nadezhda Mandelstam's retelling was both incisive and articulate. The Stalin Epigram is an entertaining, well-researched introduction, but the real story is in the memoirs.

TLS June 4 2010

Robert Littell chuyển bài thơ “Vịnh Stalin” (1) thành tiểu thuyết.

(1) THE STALIN EPIGRAM

Mandelstam's poem on Stalin (November 1933) (1) 

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there's so much as half a conversation
The Kremlins mountaineer will get his mention. 2
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—
fawning half-men for him to play with.
 They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete. 3

1. This poem, which Mrs. Mandelstam mentions on page 12 and at many other points, is nowhere quoted in full in the text of her book.
2.  In the first version, which came into the hands of the secret police, these two lines read:
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
8. "Ossete." There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood. Osseda is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus. The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians.

 Mandelstam: Chân Dung Bác Xì [Tà Lỉn]

Chúng ta sống, điếc đặc trước mặt đất bên dưới
Chỉ cần mười bước chân là chẳng ai nghe ta nói,
Nhưng ở những nơi, với câu chuyện nửa vời
Tên của kẻ sau cùng trèo tới đỉnh Cẩm Linh được nhắc tới.
Những ngón tay của kẻ đó mập như những con giun
Lời nói nặng như chì rớt khỏi môi
Ánh mắt nhìn đểu giả, râu quai nón-con gián...

Bài thơ trên có nhiều bản khác nhau. Trên, là từ hồi ký "Hy Vọng Chống lại Hy Vọng", của vợ nhà thơ, Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Làm sao Ông đã làm sao...
Tố Hữu
*
Vào tháng 11 năm 1933, Osip Mandelstam sáng tác bài thơ trứ danh “Vịnh Stalin”, ‘người leo núi Cẩm Linh’, ‘kẻ sát nhân tên làm thịt dân quê’. Tháng Năm 1934, ông bị bắt vì tội 'phản cách mạng', bị tra hỏi trong 2 tuần, nhưng lạ lùng làm sao, do lệnh trên ban xuống, không bị làm thịt hay bỏ tù, mà chỉ bị ‘cách ly nhưng đừng để chết’. Hai vợ chồng trải qua 3 năm lưu vong ra khỏi những thành phố lớn; khi trở về, sống giữa đám bạn bè lòng vòng ở Moscow. Tháng Năm 1938, ông chồng bị bắt trở lại, kết án 5 năm tù, và lần này bị đầy đi Vladivostok, chỉ kịp gửi một cái note, cho ông em/anh, gửi ‘quần áo sạch’; ông không thoát được mùa đông tại đó. Bà vợ sống dai hơn ông chồng 42 năm, nhẩn nha nhớ lại thơ chồng. Chúng ta được biết những chi tiết hiếm quí đó là qua hồi ký tuyệt vời của bà vợ, “Hy vọng chống lại hy vọng”
Là một độc giả mê cuốn hồi ý trên, Robert Litell gặp bà vợ nhà thơ vào năm 1979, cuộc gặp gỡ ông kể lại ở cuối cuốn tiểu thuyết của ông, một giả tưởng tái tạo dựng những sự kiện trong 4 năm, từ khi nhà thơ trước tác bài thơ vịnh Xì Ta lin, cho tới cái chết của ông, cộng thêm vào đó là những giọng nói của Osip, của bạn bè của ông, của thời của họ, cộng giọng nói giả tưởng hóa của tay trùm cận vệ Xì….

Tribute to Hoàng Cầm

Cái ‘xịp’ này làm cho khẩu súng của tớ bự hẳn ra!