`Poetry is a Kind of Money'

Kay Ryan is a quietly allusive writer who seldom cites proper names or grand-sounding abstractions like courage or jealousy in her poems. But then again, you won’t find suicide in Hamlet or madness in King Lear. Ryan builds her poems out of particulars, a quality she shares with Zbigniew Herbert and Osip Mandelstam. The latter, along with love (a word Ryan, like all prudent poets and others, uses sparingly), show up unexpectedly in a poem from her third collection, Flamingo Watching. Here’s “Poetry is a Kind of Money”:

“Poetry is a kind of money
whose value depends upon reserves.
It’s not the paper it’s written on
or its self-announced denomination,
but the bullion, sweated from the earth
and hidden, which preserves its worth.
Nobody knows how this works,
and how can it? Why does something
stacked in some secret bank or cabinet,
some miser’s trove, far back, lambent,
and gloated over by its golem, make us
so solemnly convinced of the transaction
when Mandelstam says love, even
in translation?”

“Reserves” is a word of delicious, multiple connotations. Ryan, like Mandelstam and Herbert, is a poet of reserves and strategic withholding. She is most expressive when least forthcoming, and says much with a single name – Mandelstam, a poet who was likelier to say Aphrodite than love. For Ryan to choose Mandelstam, of all poets, is shrewd, for the marriage of Osip and Nadezda (bitterly, hope in Russian) Mandelstam is the most moving love story of the 20th century. They were together for 19 years before Stalin had him murdered. She memorized her husband’s poems, salvaging them from oblivion. She wrote two of the last century’s great books of witness – Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. By all accounts, Nadezda Mandelstam was tough, smart and resourceful. She lived alone for more than 40 years, dying in 1980. The Soviet Union outlived her by 11 years.

I have in front of me five selections from Mandelstam in English, all by different hands. A quick perusal confirms, without surprise, that love is rare in his work and it’s seldom used in a romantic or sexual sense. For instance, there is poem dated Dec. 29-30, 1936, written during his exile to Voronezh. Here is R.H. Morrison’s translation in his Poems from Mandelstam:

“In my perception winter
is a belated gift:
I love, at the start,
it’s uncertain sweep.

“As an alarm, it is beautiful,
Like the beginning of stern deeds:
Before the whole treeless cycle
Even the raven’s grown timid.

“But precariously strongest of all
Is the blue: the semicircular
Temple-bone ice of salient
Rivulets speaking without sleep . . . .”

This is the version prepared by Richard and Elizabeth McKane, in The Voronezh Notebooks:

“This winter touches me
like a gift late in coming,
I love its wide reach
that develops out of uncertainty.

“It is beautiful in its fear,
like the menace of threats.
even the raven is afraid
before all the forest clearing.

“The pale blue of the hemispherical, protuberant ice
of streams and sleepless lullabies
is unstable, but more
powerful than anything.”

Finally, here is the same poem translated by James Greene, in his Osip Mandelstam:

“Like a tardy present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like her initial,
Diffident sweep.

Her fright is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the woodless circle.

“But more powerful than anything
Is her infirmly-bulging blueness;
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly . . .”

In Greene, love has been demoted to like, but who likes winter? As Northern natives, we may love it, but winter won’t tolerate half measures and neither will Mandelstam. In the Morrison and McKane versions, love sounds like respect or awe. In the McKanes’ note to the poem they write: “Written after the first latecoming snow had fallen in Voronezh.” As a poem in English, Greene’s loses not only love but any sense of seriousness or coherence: “infirmingly-bulging blueness.”

Back to Ryan: She’s right. In two of the three translations, love survives, and we as readers remain “solemnly convinced of the transaction.” In poetry, even love can endure, burning through the persiflage. Here’s a Ryan poem from Say Uncle with love in it – “Waste”:

“Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.”