Osip Mandelstam > Quotes

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through thick life without fear.

For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“If our enemies take me
And people stop talking to me,
If they confiscate the whole world—
The right to breathe, open doors,
Affirm that existence shall go on
And that people, like a judge, shall judge,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,
My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,
And in a corner of the ominous dark
I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice
And move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,
Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,
Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,
And in the depths of the unguarded night
The eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shine
And a flock of flaming years swoop down,
And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.
But on this earth (which shall escape decay)
There to wake up life and reason will be”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew,
And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss,
Acquire their forms before we do”
― Osip Mandelstam

“And I walk out of space
Into an overgrown garden of values,
And tear up seeming stability
And self-comprehension of causes.
And your, infinity, textbook
I read by myself, without people -
Leafless, savage medical book,
A problem book of gigantic radicals.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Я счастлив жестокой обидою,
И в жизни поxожей на сон,
Я каждому тайно завидую
И в каждого тайно влюблен.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia

“Слово -- чистое веселье, / Исцеленье от тоски !”
― Osip Mandelstam, Stone

“One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Il vento

Il vento a noi consolazione portò
e nell'azzurro fiutammo
ali assire di libellule
vibrazioni d'angolosa tenebra.
E di minaccia di guerra ottenebrò
lo strato inferiore dei cieli rabbuiati,
bosco micaceo membranoso
di corpi volanti a sei braccia
Nell'azzurro c'è un angolo cieco
e nei beati meriggi c'è sempre,
come accenno di notti che si condensi,
una tremula stella densa di fato.
E a fatica aprendosi la strada
nella squama delle ali storpiate,
sotto la sua mano dall'alto prende
l'universo sconfitto Azrail.”
― Osip Mandelstam