Translated from the Russian by Margaree Little
THE STALIN EPIGRAM
We live, not sensing the country beneath us,
our speech can’t be heard at ten steps away,
but where there is room for a half-conversation,
there we remember the mountaineer in the Kremlin.
His thick fingers, like maggots, are fat,
and his words, like pound-weights, are sure,
his eyes are laughing cockroaches,
and his boot-tops shine.
And around him, a rabble of thin-necked rulers:
he plays with the favors of half-men.
One whistles, one meows, one whimpers;
he alone blusters and pokes.
Like horseshoes, he bestows decree upon decree,
in the forehead, in the groin, in the brow, in the eye—
and every execution is like a raspberry
for the broad-chested Ossetian.
November 1933
LENINGRAD
I returned to my city, familiar to the point of tears,
of veins, of a child’s swollen glands.
You returned here, so swallow, quick,
the fish oil of Leningrad’s lamps on the river.
Recognize, quicker, the December day,
where ominous pitch is mixed with yolk.
Petersburg! I don’t want to die yet.
You have telephones for my numbers.
Petersburg! I still have addresses,
at which I will find the dead’s voices.
I live on black stairs, and a bell
torn from its flesh strikes me in the temple,
and I wait all night long for dear visitors
stirring with shackles the small chain of the door.
December 1930
Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, published his first book, Stone, in 1913. He continued to publish, but his work was increasingly censored under the Soviet regime. In 1934, he was arrested and sent with his wife into exile in Voronezh. Arrested again in 1938, he is thought to have died in a transit camp. The Voronezh Notebooks, preserved by his widow, remained unpublished in Russia until the 1980s.
Margaree Little is the author of Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), winter of the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. Her translation At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva is an Editor’s Selection from Green Linden Press, forthcoming in November 2025. Her translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva appear in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Brooklyn Rail (InTranslation); her critical writing on translating Mandelstam has been featured in APR and Asymptote. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, the Camargo Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others. She lives in Tucson.
