cf. the section of July quoted earlier today, some of the layers: it helps to know that Mandelstam, in exile in the late '30s in the little farm-river town Voronezh ("raven-knife"), listened to Marian Anderson on Moscow radio (Marian Anderson, the black diva whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial was almost cancelled by the D.A.R.), & wrote a poem about it (the poem is also about a Leningrad singer whose husband had just been sent to the camps). #45, 2nd Voronezh Notebook.

the reader should be aware by now that I find Mandelstam's Voronezh poems extremely beautiful, like the 3rd movement of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132.

(incidentally, the "arc of praises" where "love & liberty are married" through the trials & tribulations of a "little school of J" is a pretty good summa of the "law of identity/tautology" poetics I outlined last week.)

1st & last stanzas from the poem, in the McKanes' (clearly inadequate) translation:

I am buried in the lion's den and into this fortress
I sink lower, lower and lower,
listening to the yeasty cloudburst of sounds
stronger than the lion, more powerful than the Pentateuch.

 
*

 
My time is still limitless,
and I accompanied the joy of the universe
like the quiet organ's playing
accompanies a woman's voice.