Eyewear is pleased to publish a new translation of a great poem by Mandelstam, by Alistair Noon in Berlin. This is probably one of the first poems on the cinema. Vachel Lindsay, of course, had written on the subject.
Cinema
Three benches. A projector.
The fever of sentimentality.
An
heiress who's been trapped
in her evil rival's nets.
Hands off this
love's true flight,
our heroine's done nothing wrong!
So pure it's almost
platonic
is her love for a lieutenant of the fleet,
collaterally
conceived by a grey count
and now wandering the desert wastes.
This, for
the pretty countess, is the way
her picture-adventure leaves the
ground.
She starts to wring her hands
like a gypsy gone insane.
The
lovers split. The demonic sounds
now follow of a hounded piano.
Her
trust's not hard to abuse.
She possesses sufficient bravery
to swoop on
some crucial papers
of interest to an enemy HQ.
Along an avenue of
chestnuts,
a black motor car lumbers.
The film reel rattles. A thump
of
alarm thrills our hearts.
Sensibly dressed, with her sac à voyage,
she
travels the roads and rails.
All she's scared of is the chase;
she's
tormented by a dry mirage.
The ending's both bitter and trite.
Means
aren't justified by ends!
He gets his father's inheritance,
and she gets
sentenced to life.
Osip Mandelstam, 1913
Translated from the
Russian by Alistair Noon
Eyewear Publishing Looking For You!
