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I'm here as a translator rather than a poet.

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And I think translators should be neither seen or heard.

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So I hope you forgive me. But if you look at the first issue of Archipelago,

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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.

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I'm grateful to you for commissioning the translation, which takes us to the outer orbits of the archipelago.

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And I want to say a few things about the context for the poems,

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and then just talk a little bit about the sound of the poem and its arguments and illustrate by reading to two stanzas,

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I should say, as you'll hear in a second, that Mr. Stern was a great lover of medieval architecture and stone,

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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.

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The Ode on the Slate is one of his most difficult poems, one of his most famous, the romantic poems.

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And it really inaugurates a great change in his poetics.

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Until the early 1920s, Stone was among the stamps metaphor for the durability and beauty of poetry in the poems of his first collection,

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which was entitled Stone Cannon. He is a poet of the daylight.

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He sees harmony of a neoclassical kind between nature and culture,

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and the early poems in their linguistic brilliance rival the contrapuntal Order of Bach.

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There's a wonderful poem about Bach they saw visually with the Gothic Arch and Buttresses of Notre Dame.

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Again, this is a poem entitled Notre Dame.

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They transpose the cathedrals of the Kremlin onto the churches of Florence, and perhaps more optimistically, than T.S. Eliot.

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By comparison, they recover from the debris of the past.

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The stuff of a new art mandelstam's poet figure is a down to earth, very superior craftsman.

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And nothing like I make is. Uh.

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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.

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But in the changed universe of 1922, his material is Slate rather than stone.

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The old on the slate is about Slate and not stone of a trusted kind.

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His landscape is an elemental rock face rather than European church architecture.

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And the autumn slate is a poem of the night and near prehistoric darkness.

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Mr. Stone wrote his late poem in 1922.

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At the time, he was not yet officially ostracised or unofficially hounded by the institutions of proletarian culture.

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His first arrest came 12 years later in 1934,

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but he already understood how profoundly hostile Soviet Russia was to his values and to the freedom of poetry.

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He even branded himself an honest traitor in a poem of 1923,

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and the cultural mainland of the Judeo-Christian civilisation about which he wrote so much was receding.

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And the ode on a slate is his vision of the archipelago of cultural survival.

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Mandelstam's Archipelago. Not yet the all too real gulag archipelago.

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That would be his final destination in 1938.

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This archipelago is the primitive landscape described in the Ode on Slate,

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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.

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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.

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So the poem is a self-effacing poem, in a way.

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Now the title in Russian Christine I Order like the translation of the title in English is ambiguous.

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You know, the poem is an ode on a slate in that it is written on a slate.

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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.

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So is this a poem in Praise of Slate, as the title suggests? Well, a solar prize is audible in the sound texture,

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which pulls away from the enigmatic and verbally dense images attuned to the same dialogue of the stars.

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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.

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And the poem begins with a quotation from Hunter, who also wrote a famous poem about a solitary poet contemplating the skies.

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And Mandelstam opens by hailing the mighty conjunction of that old song.

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Poetry, which is what he means by the old song, is of the same elemental quality as the song of the stars.

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This is the creative energy of nature. What for? The German Romantics was the sublime voice of the universal whole.

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With his flints and his voices no more powerful than the drip of water on a rock.

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He can, from that old song, build a structure, even in a barren world,

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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.

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In the poem.

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The Russian word Crimean, which means Flint is encrusted with alliteration on the shore and weighted with the heavy assonance of long vowels.

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Much of the verbal texture is made from three phonetic combinations.

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In the words of Slate and Flint. So that's Crimean. Griffin and Cook with Semi VocalIQ a sound.

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We don't have an English sort of depth.

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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,

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which is reprised in the final ninth stanza, are the words stick, which means conjunction.

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So the conjunction of the stars and Isaac, meaning both tongue and language.

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And this is what the first stanza sounds like. As we start this day.

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Magoo Krispy Kreme needs to see Start-ups in Cremona.

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Evo-stik are using Corinthians lot with spot coffee and meal consultants a block off my watch, an increasingly worrisome look.

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Just. MIROFF A period of Panasonic.

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This sound pattern ebbs away until erupting in the last two stanzas.

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Once again, the poet hears the sound of the mighty conjunction of song.

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That link start with stars and the heavens above,

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and that mighty conjunction is also at work in the earth, in the geological activity of the landscape.

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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.

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So he's described this rock face in deeply metaphorical, intense language and then contemplates his own future.

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And he lists clandestine occupations. And that list is based on phonetic and grammatical parallelism.

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And it echoes the same sound clusters associated with the Slade, the flint and the music of the universe.

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This musical pattern is an associated corroboration of oneness with the slate,

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despite the fact that as an outsider to the culture, monster storm no longer has the right to build.

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He cannot be a mason. It's coming sheep. He cannot be a roofer.

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KRAWCZYK He cannot be a ship builder. He can only be an auctioneer.

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He says the strange ship with a flint arrow, a furtive warrior with his double so.

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So he asks, Who am I to hire me?

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Come in, Primo Nick ravishing Nicaraguan sheep cheap Russian.

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I know it You sure you are not?

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She drew yet a strange ship large opportunity of our premium, which only converted proportionally billions of dollars of his premium.

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Part of it would not your departure and in the final stanza.

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Language.

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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.

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Language leads to the roundness of the ring and horseshoe symbols in the last stanza of continuity and creativity in the final line,

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as the poet seems ready to found civilisation all over again.

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There are no cathedrals to be admired in this apocalyptic world.

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Civilisation is no more than the obliquely observed huts of shepherds perched in the rock face.

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Yet for all its foreboding and fear, this poem amazingly prolongs the architectural impulse that inspired the younger winter storms.

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Lyrics about Notre Dame, about Hagia Sophia are not a great buildings.

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The Ode is a piece of monumental lyric architecture, a home to the salvaged voices of earlier poets,

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including the amateur novelist Gerta and his Russian predecessor, Jonathan.

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The particular musical line that I'm picking out for you instead of 72, lines had 16.

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This particular line is important because the poet has only the phonetic architecture at his disposal.

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But that is no small thing since the song of his poetry and that of the slate are one and the same.

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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.

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Thank you.