Osip Mandelstam: The Age

My animal, my age, who will ever be able

to look you into your eyes?

Who will ever glue back together the vertebrae

of two centuries with his blood?

Blood the maker gushes

from the throats of the things of earth.

Already the hanger-on is trembling

on the sills of days to come.

Blood the maker gushes

from the throats of the things of earth

and flings onto a beach like a burning fish

a hot sand of sea-bones,

and down from the high bird-net,

out of the wet blocks of sky

it pours, pours, heedlessly

over your death-wound.

Only a metal the flute has melted

will link up the strings of days

until a time is torn out of jail

and the world starts new.

The age is rocking the wave

with human grief

to a golden beat, and an adder

is breathing in time with it in the grass.

The buds will go on swelling,

the rush of green will explode,

but your spine has been shattered,

my splendid derelict, my age.

Cruel and feeble, you'll look back

with the smile of a half-wit:

an animal that could run once,

staring at his own tracks.

1923

Translated from the Russian by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin