1 00:00:02,310 --> 00:00:05,340 I'm here as a translator rather than a poet. 2 00:00:05,340 --> 00:00:09,180 And I think translators should be neither seen or heard. 3 00:00:09,180 --> 00:00:13,860 So I hope you forgive me. But if you look at the first issue of Archipelago, 4 00:00:13,860 --> 00:00:25,160 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. 5 00:00:25,190 --> 00:00:30,150 I'm grateful to you for commissioning the translation, which takes us to the outer orbits of the archipelago. 6 00:00:30,690 --> 00:00:34,320 And I want to say a few things about the context for the poems, 7 00:00:34,710 --> 00:00:43,050 and then just talk a little bit about the sound of the poem and its arguments and illustrate by reading to two stanzas, 8 00:00:43,350 --> 00:00:48,690 I should say, as you'll hear in a second, that Mr. Stern was a great lover of medieval architecture and stone, 9 00:00:49,170 --> 00:00:57,480 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. 10 00:00:59,100 --> 00:01:05,130 The Ode on the Slate is one of his most difficult poems, one of his most famous, the romantic poems. 11 00:01:06,900 --> 00:01:11,640 And it really inaugurates a great change in his poetics. 12 00:01:11,790 --> 00:01:20,429 Until the early 1920s, Stone was among the stamps metaphor for the durability and beauty of poetry in the poems of his first collection, 13 00:01:20,430 --> 00:01:24,659 which was entitled Stone Cannon. He is a poet of the daylight. 14 00:01:24,660 --> 00:01:28,710 He sees harmony of a neoclassical kind between nature and culture, 15 00:01:29,220 --> 00:01:34,080 and the early poems in their linguistic brilliance rival the contrapuntal Order of Bach. 16 00:01:34,080 --> 00:01:40,469 There's a wonderful poem about Bach they saw visually with the Gothic Arch and Buttresses of Notre Dame. 17 00:01:40,470 --> 00:01:42,690 Again, this is a poem entitled Notre Dame. 18 00:01:43,080 --> 00:01:49,350 They transpose the cathedrals of the Kremlin onto the churches of Florence, and perhaps more optimistically, than T.S. Eliot. 19 00:01:49,350 --> 00:01:52,469 By comparison, they recover from the debris of the past. 20 00:01:52,470 --> 00:01:59,459 The stuff of a new art mandelstam's poet figure is a down to earth, very superior craftsman. 21 00:01:59,460 --> 00:02:02,540 And nothing like I make is. Uh. 22 00:02:02,760 --> 00:02:10,290 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. 23 00:02:10,920 --> 00:02:17,190 But in the changed universe of 1922, his material is Slate rather than stone. 24 00:02:17,280 --> 00:02:21,900 The old on the slate is about Slate and not stone of a trusted kind. 25 00:02:22,140 --> 00:02:27,180 His landscape is an elemental rock face rather than European church architecture. 26 00:02:27,480 --> 00:02:31,470 And the autumn slate is a poem of the night and near prehistoric darkness. 27 00:02:32,130 --> 00:02:34,830 Mr. Stone wrote his late poem in 1922. 28 00:02:35,250 --> 00:02:41,820 At the time, he was not yet officially ostracised or unofficially hounded by the institutions of proletarian culture. 29 00:02:42,210 --> 00:02:45,630 His first arrest came 12 years later in 1934, 30 00:02:46,320 --> 00:02:52,620 but he already understood how profoundly hostile Soviet Russia was to his values and to the freedom of poetry. 31 00:02:53,100 --> 00:02:58,050 He even branded himself an honest traitor in a poem of 1923, 32 00:02:58,440 --> 00:03:06,030 and the cultural mainland of the Judeo-Christian civilisation about which he wrote so much was receding. 33 00:03:06,540 --> 00:03:11,100 And the ode on a slate is his vision of the archipelago of cultural survival. 34 00:03:11,760 --> 00:03:16,020 Mandelstam's Archipelago. Not yet the all too real gulag archipelago. 35 00:03:16,320 --> 00:03:19,470 That would be his final destination in 1938. 36 00:03:20,730 --> 00:03:25,080 This archipelago is the primitive landscape described in the Ode on Slate, 37 00:03:25,440 --> 00:03:31,740 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. 38 00:03:32,340 --> 00:03:42,389 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. 39 00:03:42,390 --> 00:03:45,570 So the poem is a self-effacing poem, in a way. 40 00:03:46,680 --> 00:03:53,070 Now the title in Russian Christine I Order like the translation of the title in English is ambiguous. 41 00:03:54,360 --> 00:03:58,200 You know, the poem is an ode on a slate in that it is written on a slate. 42 00:03:58,380 --> 00:04:07,500 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. 43 00:04:08,400 --> 00:04:15,580 So is this a poem in Praise of Slate, as the title suggests? Well, a solar prize is audible in the sound texture, 44 00:04:15,820 --> 00:04:22,620 which pulls away from the enigmatic and verbally dense images attuned to the same dialogue of the stars. 45 00:04:22,630 --> 00:04:31,180 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. 46 00:04:31,210 --> 00:04:39,460 And the poem begins with a quotation from Hunter, who also wrote a famous poem about a solitary poet contemplating the skies. 47 00:04:39,460 --> 00:04:44,200 And Mandelstam opens by hailing the mighty conjunction of that old song. 48 00:04:45,970 --> 00:04:51,550 Poetry, which is what he means by the old song, is of the same elemental quality as the song of the stars. 49 00:04:52,120 --> 00:04:58,000 This is the creative energy of nature. What for? The German Romantics was the sublime voice of the universal whole. 50 00:04:58,570 --> 00:05:02,860 With his flints and his voices no more powerful than the drip of water on a rock. 51 00:05:03,550 --> 00:05:07,150 He can, from that old song, build a structure, even in a barren world, 52 00:05:07,720 --> 00:05:17,410 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. 53 00:05:17,710 --> 00:05:18,310 In the poem. 54 00:05:19,210 --> 00:05:27,880 The Russian word Crimean, which means Flint is encrusted with alliteration on the shore and weighted with the heavy assonance of long vowels. 55 00:05:28,480 --> 00:05:32,330 Much of the verbal texture is made from three phonetic combinations. 56 00:05:33,970 --> 00:05:41,140 In the words of Slate and Flint. So that's Crimean. Griffin and Cook with Semi VocalIQ a sound. 57 00:05:41,170 --> 00:05:42,700 We don't have an English sort of depth. 58 00:05:43,510 --> 00:05:50,830 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, 59 00:05:50,980 --> 00:05:56,250 which is reprised in the final ninth stanza, are the words stick, which means conjunction. 60 00:05:56,260 --> 00:06:00,910 So the conjunction of the stars and Isaac, meaning both tongue and language. 61 00:06:01,180 --> 00:06:06,290 And this is what the first stanza sounds like. As we start this day. 62 00:06:06,320 --> 00:06:10,969 Magoo Krispy Kreme needs to see Start-ups in Cremona. 63 00:06:10,970 --> 00:06:19,910 Evo-stik are using Corinthians lot with spot coffee and meal consultants a block off my watch, an increasingly worrisome look. 64 00:06:21,290 --> 00:06:24,890 Just. MIROFF A period of Panasonic. 65 00:06:25,920 --> 00:06:29,820 This sound pattern ebbs away until erupting in the last two stanzas. 66 00:06:30,210 --> 00:06:33,330 Once again, the poet hears the sound of the mighty conjunction of song. 67 00:06:33,660 --> 00:06:36,060 That link start with stars and the heavens above, 68 00:06:36,600 --> 00:06:42,860 and that mighty conjunction is also at work in the earth, in the geological activity of the landscape. 69 00:06:42,870 --> 00:06:52,109 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. 70 00:06:52,110 --> 00:06:58,470 So he's described this rock face in deeply metaphorical, intense language and then contemplates his own future. 71 00:06:58,980 --> 00:07:05,400 And he lists clandestine occupations. And that list is based on phonetic and grammatical parallelism. 72 00:07:06,150 --> 00:07:11,430 And it echoes the same sound clusters associated with the Slade, the flint and the music of the universe. 73 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:16,590 This musical pattern is an associated corroboration of oneness with the slate, 74 00:07:17,100 --> 00:07:23,010 despite the fact that as an outsider to the culture, monster storm no longer has the right to build. 75 00:07:23,520 --> 00:07:27,740 He cannot be a mason. It's coming sheep. He cannot be a roofer. 76 00:07:27,940 --> 00:07:32,700 KRAWCZYK He cannot be a ship builder. He can only be an auctioneer. 77 00:07:32,730 --> 00:07:37,770 He says the strange ship with a flint arrow, a furtive warrior with his double so. 78 00:07:38,550 --> 00:07:41,850 So he asks, Who am I to hire me? 79 00:07:41,880 --> 00:07:46,770 Come in, Primo Nick ravishing Nicaraguan sheep cheap Russian. 80 00:07:47,310 --> 00:07:49,370 I know it You sure you are not? 81 00:07:49,380 --> 00:07:57,990 She drew yet a strange ship large opportunity of our premium, which only converted proportionally billions of dollars of his premium. 82 00:07:57,990 --> 00:08:02,400 Part of it would not your departure and in the final stanza. 83 00:08:03,710 --> 00:08:04,550 Language. 84 00:08:04,550 --> 00:08:12,080 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. 85 00:08:12,470 --> 00:08:19,820 Language leads to the roundness of the ring and horseshoe symbols in the last stanza of continuity and creativity in the final line, 86 00:08:20,210 --> 00:08:23,270 as the poet seems ready to found civilisation all over again. 87 00:08:24,560 --> 00:08:27,620 There are no cathedrals to be admired in this apocalyptic world. 88 00:08:28,010 --> 00:08:32,480 Civilisation is no more than the obliquely observed huts of shepherds perched in the rock face. 89 00:08:33,200 --> 00:08:40,220 Yet for all its foreboding and fear, this poem amazingly prolongs the architectural impulse that inspired the younger winter storms. 90 00:08:40,250 --> 00:08:44,180 Lyrics about Notre Dame, about Hagia Sophia are not a great buildings. 91 00:08:44,810 --> 00:08:49,910 The Ode is a piece of monumental lyric architecture, a home to the salvaged voices of earlier poets, 92 00:08:50,270 --> 00:08:55,460 including the amateur novelist Gerta and his Russian predecessor, Jonathan. 93 00:08:56,180 --> 00:09:01,640 The particular musical line that I'm picking out for you instead of 72, lines had 16. 94 00:09:02,210 --> 00:09:07,400 This particular line is important because the poet has only the phonetic architecture at his disposal. 95 00:09:07,940 --> 00:09:13,460 But that is no small thing since the song of his poetry and that of the slate are one and the same. 96 00:09:14,270 --> 00:09:21,450 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. 97 00:09:22,250 --> 00:09:22,560 Thank you.