'Mandelstam Dances Barefoot in the Snow Alone'

“In the end like all great poets he became a jester” 

Not the usual encomium one expects for Osip Mandelstam, dead at age forty-seven in a Soviet camp, but the eulogist is Zbigniew Herbert, a congenitally ironic poet, ever aware of the comic in the appalling. For my birthday I was given Reconstruction of the Poet: Uncollected Works of Zbigniew Herbert (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2024). The poem is “Mandelstam,” and in her introduction Valles tells us: “The child of a tragic country, [Herbert] was sustained by the gravity of classical order and the grace of a vital sense of humor.” A recurrent theme in the new collection is Herbert’s approbation for the fellow poets he admires (Shakespeare, Auden, Paul Celan, even John Berryman). In the third stanza of “Mandelstam” he writes:

 

“Decades have passed now no one is looking for you

unless in the other world Mr Brodsky now searches for a trace

he was always so precise space and time abandoned him

he counted syllables like a miser but also conversed with shades”  

 

Valles has already given us Herbert’s Collected Poems (2007) and Collected Prose (2010), and in the new book she includes three plays and seventy-four poems. Herbert’s “Mandelstam” concludes:

 

“And Mandelstam dances to increase the joy of existence

Mandelstam dances barefoot in the snow alone”

 

Varlam Shalamov, a Russian, wrote a short story about Mandelstam’s final days, “Cherry Brandy," after the seventeen years he spent in the Gulag. Like Herbert he is a grim ironist. Shalamov writes:

 

“Writing down and printing was just vanity of vanities. The best was the unrecorded, what vanished after it was composed, what melted away without a trace; only the creative joy that he felt, and which could not be mistaken for anything else, proved that the poem had been created, that something fine had been created. Could he be mistaken? Was his creative joy infallible?”

 

[“Cherry Brandy” is collected in Kolyma Stories (trans. Donald Rayfield, New York Review Books, 2018). See also Rayfield’s translation of Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World (introduction by Valles, NYRB, 2020).]