'They Have at Least This Requiem'

Stephen Edgar’s new poem, “The Noise of Time,” shares a title with Osip Mandelstam’s autobiographical prose – story? essay? – published in 1925. The poem’s speaker listens to a CD of Sviatoslav Richter’s piano recital recorded in Sofia in 1958: Mussorgsky, Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. The audio quality is poor: “the faintest hiss” and “A few odd snuffles and cleared throats / Rudely descanting on the notes, / And, intermittent and remiss, / The creak of seats and scuffing feet.” Then the speaker remembers the context:

“. . . shades of the Eastern Bloc,

Drabness, dread and the midnight knock,

The list of names too long to trace.”

The audience of more than sixty years ago dwells in what Edgar calls “that grey-lit frozen zone.” He means the drab limbo of post-Stalin Bulgaria, but also that vaporous region inhabited by the unknown and forgotten dead:

“These listeners in the concert hall,

They have at least this requiem,

Though all they have left us to recall

That they have been, inscribed on air,

Is no more than a shifting chair

Or the ill-timed loosening of phlegm.”

Chap. XIII, “Komissarzhevskaya,” of Mandelstam’s “Noise of Time” (The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown, 1986) begins:

“My desire is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal. If it depended on me, I should only make a wry face in remembering the past. I was never able to understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, all those grand Bagrovs, enamored of family archives with their epic domestic memoirs. I repeat—my memory is not loving but inimical, and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past.”

In his introduction to “The Noise of Time,” Brown writes of Mandelstam: “He was preeminently the poet of the present moment, of the literal fact in all its particularity, believing that only the instant of the artist’s perception has any chance of withstanding time’s attrition . . .”