Quotes from Osip Mandelstam

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One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but 'progress' — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.

For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips, And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew, And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss, Acquire their forms before we do

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

I was born in the night of the second and third Of January, ninety-something-or-other, An unreliable year, and the centuries Surround me with fire.

I am wearied to death with life. There's nothing it has that I want, but I celebrate my naked earth, there's no other world to descant.

Sleep is light in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out straight, recalls the length of the trip. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures you, bricks you up. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge...

Life is one in all its manifestations. You must experience everything, be capable of everything, and rejoice in everything.

In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. from Stone: 24 By Osip Mandelstam Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin

We have come to love the music of proof. Logical connection for us is not some popular song about a finch, but a choral symphony, so difficult and so inspired that the conductor must exert all his energy to keep the performers under his control.

I want you now so awfully, No longer jealous-green, I bring myself as offering Up to the guillotine.

And like unoccupied heart's home, You'll fill the fragile shell, With wind, with whispers of the foam, And fog, and rain as well…

I breathed in forbidden life.

O, may my lips someday attain The primal muteness that I've sought - That's like a flawless crystal note, Its purity - from birth sustained.

a ship could be built entirely from foreign planks, but it must have its own form

Yo soy tan pobre como la naturaleza, y tan simple como el firmamento.

A word does not suppress This dryness spreading through, Dense air is emptiness For me without you.

The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood.

The spiritual disposition of a poet inclines to catastrophe.

The careful muffled sound of fruit That plummets, broken from a tree, Amid the constant melody Of the deep silence of the wood…

A heroic era has opened in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering. People are hungry. The state is even hungrier. But there is something hungrier yet: time.

Quelle douleur - chercher la parole perdue, Relever ces paupières douloureuses Et, la chaux dans le sang, rassembler pour les tribus étrangères L'herbe des nuits.