ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023 https://tworiverspress.com/shop/paradise-takeaway/) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two Verse Essays available from Longbarrow Press
https://longbarrowpress.com/current-publications/alistair-noon/
He lives in Berlin.
In 1930, Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin arranged for the Russian poet OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) to take a trip of several months to the Soviet Caucasus, most of which was spent in Armenia. The trip kickstarted Mandelstam’s poetry again, which had been in hiatus for five years, not least due to political pressure and the narrowing of publication opportunities. A number of poems Mandelstam wrote during or after the trip were not included in the “Armenia” cycle itself but retained in the manuscripts he and his wife, Nadezhda, kept for possible future publication. These are translated here.
Translations from Mandelstam
Scratching out words from the Ararat valley,
Armenian’s like a wild cat,
a clawlike language of mudbrick cities,
the speech of hungering bricks.
The sky is shah, but the shah’s short-sighted,
its turquoise blind from birth:
it still can’t read that hollowed volume
of clay baked hard with dark blood.
October 1930
I love this land that strains
to give birth, that dozes and cries,
this nation nailed to its terrain,
the centuries mere years in its eyes.
How beautiful everything sounds
in your ear that patrols the frontier,
where the stinking ragwort surrounds
the mustard hush that reigns here…
October 1930
That feral cat, Armenian speech,
plays with me, scratches my ears till they’ve bled,
gives me a fever. You evil creature!
Let me doze off on this humpbacked bed!
Down from the ceiling tumble the glow-worms.
Flies crawl over the sodden terrain
of the sheet. Battalions of long-legged birds
march in platoons over yellowing plains.
Fearsome inspector, face like a mattress,
truly pathetic and superrepellent,
short of a pass and yet they dispatched you
into Armenian steppes – what the hell?
They told you to kindly remove your butt:
“No one needs your sort round here! Get lost!”
Head of a Desk, you’d taken your cut,
were once with the Guards, but the spit washed off.
“Look who’s here!” you boom at the door.
But like two girls out hunting mushrooms,
we won’t have to wait too long before
we find good coffins to put in our tombs…
Once we were people. Now we talk piffle –
what would you say is our service grade? –
condemned to a final stitch in the ribs
and a poet’s bunch of Erzurum grapes.
October 1930
Where pifflers howl like beasts in the wild,
and beasts are like people, unleashing their tricks,
short of a pass, dispatched like an exile
bound to a cart, in a sorceror’s power,
the inspector headed for Erzurum sips
Chernomor’s wine at a tavern gone sour.
October 1930
As we crossed the mountain pass
up high on the Muslim side,
Death topped up our glasses.
We’d cantered out of a nightmare
in the hands of a charioteer
the sun had baked like a plum,
a local devil for hire
and monosyllabically glum:
“Tso!” As we gathered pace,
he croaked on down the road,
a Bedouin hiding his face
like a rose perhaps, or a toad.
His hideous features concealed
in a leather mask, he forced
the ponies pulling our wheels
onwards until he was hoarse.
We felt his haste, felt the jolts,
and every roadside stop
spun like the passing chariots.
No road led down from the top.
“Damn it!” I cried, wide awake,
“Stop here!” I screamed at the back
of this chairman mad with the plague
and headed down the wrong track!
With a whoop, he cracked the wire reins,
that noseless horseman: we felt
the sweet and sour terrain
turn like a carousel.
These were the terrors that found
their way right into my soul
in Shusha, the fortress town
that wolves and vultures controlled –
a cocoon no human sound
rang through, a grave in the mountains.
Dead windows all around
were visible by the thousand,
the houses’ soft pink walls
standing shamelessly naked.
And over them hung the pall
of the sky, as blue as the plague.
12 June 1931
Paradise Takeaway available from Two Rivers Press
https://tworiverspress.com/shop/paradise-takeaway/
Two Verse Essays available from Longbarrow Press
https://longbarrowpress.com/current-publications/alistair-noon/
ALISTAIR NOON’s recent publications include Paradise Takeaway (Two Rivers, 2023) and two further volumes of his translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam (The Voronezh Workbooks and Occasional and Joke Poems, Shearsman, 2022). His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, the Guardian and New Statesman, and he’s published essays on translocality and poetry, Wuhan Punk and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lives in Berlin.