I'm here as a translator rather than a poet.
And I think translators should be neither seen or heard.
So I hope you forgive me. But if you look at the first issue of Archipelago,
you'll see there's a 72 line poem by Osip mandelstam and you'll be relieved to hear I'm not going to read you or 72 lines, but I understand.
I'm grateful to you for commissioning the translation, which takes us to the outer orbits of the archipelago.
And I want to say a few things about the context for the poems,
and then just talk a little bit about the sound of the poem and its arguments and illustrate by reading to two stanzas,
I should say, as you'll hear in a second, that Mr. Stern was a great lover of medieval architecture and stone,
and I'd forgotten what the divinity school looked like. So it's a great privilege to talk about him in this in this wonderful building.
The Ode on the Slate is one of his most difficult poems, one of his most famous, the romantic poems.
And it really inaugurates a great change in his poetics.
Until the early 1920s, Stone was among the stamps metaphor for the durability and beauty of poetry in the poems of his first collection,
which was entitled Stone Cannon. He is a poet of the daylight.
He sees harmony of a neoclassical kind between nature and culture,
and the early poems in their linguistic brilliance rival the contrapuntal Order of Bach.
There's a wonderful poem about Bach they saw visually with the Gothic Arch and Buttresses of Notre Dame.
Again, this is a poem entitled Notre Dame.
They transpose the cathedrals of the Kremlin onto the churches of Florence, and perhaps more optimistically, than T.S. Eliot.
By comparison, they recover from the debris of the past.
The stuff of a new art mandelstam's poet figure is a down to earth, very superior craftsman.
And nothing like I make is. Uh.
The poet has the will to make art happen, and he speaks from the centre of his culture and for the intersection of East and West.
But in the changed universe of 1922, his material is Slate rather than stone.
The old on the slate is about Slate and not stone of a trusted kind.
His landscape is an elemental rock face rather than European church architecture.
And the autumn slate is a poem of the night and near prehistoric darkness.
Mr. Stone wrote his late poem in 1922.
At the time, he was not yet officially ostracised or unofficially hounded by the institutions of proletarian culture.
His first arrest came 12 years later in 1934,
but he already understood how profoundly hostile Soviet Russia was to his values and to the freedom of poetry.
He even branded himself an honest traitor in a poem of 1923,
and the cultural mainland of the Judeo-Christian civilisation about which he wrote so much was receding.
And the ode on a slate is his vision of the archipelago of cultural survival.
Mandelstam's Archipelago. Not yet the all too real gulag archipelago.
That would be his final destination in 1938.
This archipelago is the primitive landscape described in the Ode on Slate,
where the poet hides and in this barren terrain with a fruit of the classical world is reduced to the image of a single vine.
Poetic technology is only a flint, a piece of flint with which he scratches words on the slate, words that he then erases out of fear.
So the poem is a self-effacing poem, in a way.
Now the title in Russian Christine I Order like the translation of the title in English is ambiguous.
You know, the poem is an ode on a slate in that it is written on a slate.
In fact, it is seems to be written on a whole mountain of slate, but at the same time the titles can mean in Russian a note in praise of Slate.
So is this a poem in Praise of Slate, as the title suggests? Well, a solar prize is audible in the sound texture,
which pulls away from the enigmatic and verbally dense images attuned to the same dialogue of the stars.
The poem begins with, I suppose, the poet walking out and looking at the stars and thinking about the way in which they seem to talk to one another.
And the poem begins with a quotation from Hunter, who also wrote a famous poem about a solitary poet contemplating the skies.
And Mandelstam opens by hailing the mighty conjunction of that old song.
Poetry, which is what he means by the old song, is of the same elemental quality as the song of the stars.
This is the creative energy of nature. What for? The German Romantics was the sublime voice of the universal whole.
With his flints and his voices no more powerful than the drip of water on a rock.
He can, from that old song, build a structure, even in a barren world,
and understand does create seemingly solid matter out of sound from the very opening flint as a type of matter is given its own musical substance.
In the poem.
The Russian word Crimean, which means Flint is encrusted with alliteration on the shore and weighted with the heavy assonance of long vowels.
Much of the verbal texture is made from three phonetic combinations.
In the words of Slate and Flint. So that's Crimean. Griffin and Cook with Semi VocalIQ a sound.
We don't have an English sort of depth.
Over and over again, this percussive K like flint against hard rock is struck, and the key pair of rhyme words in the first stanza,
which is reprised in the final ninth stanza, are the words stick, which means conjunction.
So the conjunction of the stars and Isaac, meaning both tongue and language.
And this is what the first stanza sounds like. As we start this day.
Magoo Krispy Kreme needs to see Start-ups in Cremona.
Evo-stik are using Corinthians lot with spot coffee and meal consultants a block off my watch, an increasingly worrisome look.
Just. MIROFF A period of Panasonic.
This sound pattern ebbs away until erupting in the last two stanzas.
Once again, the poet hears the sound of the mighty conjunction of song.
That link start with stars and the heavens above,
and that mighty conjunction is also at work in the earth, in the geological activity of the landscape.
And he seems to hear it. And in the eighth stanza, the poet wonders about his identity and what disguises or aliases will keep him safe.
So he's described this rock face in deeply metaphorical, intense language and then contemplates his own future.
And he lists clandestine occupations. And that list is based on phonetic and grammatical parallelism.
And it echoes the same sound clusters associated with the Slade, the flint and the music of the universe.
This musical pattern is an associated corroboration of oneness with the slate,
despite the fact that as an outsider to the culture, monster storm no longer has the right to build.
He cannot be a mason. It's coming sheep. He cannot be a roofer.
KRAWCZYK He cannot be a ship builder. He can only be an auctioneer.
He says the strange ship with a flint arrow, a furtive warrior with his double so.
So he asks, Who am I to hire me?
Come in, Primo Nick ravishing Nicaraguan sheep cheap Russian.
I know it You sure you are not?
She drew yet a strange ship large opportunity of our premium, which only converted proportionally billions of dollars of his premium.
Part of it would not your departure and in the final stanza.
Language.
Music forges, the scene sticks and they rhyme once again for the second time in the poem, Closing the cracks that have opened in the Universe.
Language leads to the roundness of the ring and horseshoe symbols in the last stanza of continuity and creativity in the final line,
as the poet seems ready to found civilisation all over again.
There are no cathedrals to be admired in this apocalyptic world.
Civilisation is no more than the obliquely observed huts of shepherds perched in the rock face.
Yet for all its foreboding and fear, this poem amazingly prolongs the architectural impulse that inspired the younger winter storms.
Lyrics about Notre Dame, about Hagia Sophia are not a great buildings.
The Ode is a piece of monumental lyric architecture, a home to the salvaged voices of earlier poets,
including the amateur novelist Gerta and his Russian predecessor, Jonathan.
The particular musical line that I'm picking out for you instead of 72, lines had 16.
This particular line is important because the poet has only the phonetic architecture at his disposal.
But that is no small thing since the song of his poetry and that of the slate are one and the same.
The Ode on the Slate is not about the triumph of the will, but a triumph of an unstoppable musical instinct that the poet in nature shares.
Thank you.