Osip Mandelshtam might have called Tsvetaeva’s “moan” an initial articulation of the poetic impulse (порывь. Nadezhda Mandelshtam notes that for Mandelshtam and Akhmatova the impulse announced itself, not as a moan, but as a humming, but in a 1926 letter to Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak also speaks of the “moan” as “the loudest sound of the universe”: “I am inclined to believe that outer space is filled with this sound rather than with the music of the spheres. I hear it. I cannot reproduce it”). … what apparently occurs in translation is the realization of an impossibility. In a 1933 essay on Dante, Mandelshtam wrote that for poetry to be poetry, there must be an impulse that is not susceptible to paraphrase and whose absence is a sure sign that “the sheets have never been rumpled” and that “poetry has never spent the night.” In and of itself this impulse is “mute”; it sounds verbally in the poem through “the modulation we hear and sense in the prosodic instruments of poetic speech in its instananeous flow.” A task for Mandelshtam’s translators will be to find modulations that his poetry can impel in the spontaneous flow of an alien tongue. Mandelshtam was confident that this was possible. In a 1932 poem “To the German Language” which reads in retrospect like a proleptic address to Paul Celan, Mandelshtam wrote:

An alien tongue will be my membrane
just as once, before I had the daring
to be born, I was a letter first, a vineyard
line, a book you dreamed of…

Sounds have narrowed, the words hiss and mutiny,
but you are living, and from you I am composed.

Pasternak wote in Safe Conduct (1928): “that as distinct from science, which takes nature in the section of a shaft of light, art is interested in life at the moment when the beam of energy passes through it. When the signs of this condition are translated onto paper… there is a terminology for them. They are called devices.” Pasternak described the work of this “energy” or impulse in Doctor Zhivago as characteristic of poetic practice:

Language… itself begins to think and speak… and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow… [T]he flow in speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter and rhythm and countless forms and formations, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.

A task for Pasternak’s English translators will be to find this “flow in speech” as it carries from Russian into English. “Like the original,” Pasternak wrote of his own translations of Shakespeare (1956), “the translation must create an impression of life… a shorthand of the spirit” (as Elena Glazov-Corrigan has suggested, “spirit,” дух and “impulse,” порывь can be regarded as synonyms in this context, translations of the Greek, Πνευμα).

What happens when a flow in speech carries from Russian into English? Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Mandelshtam all write in rhymed and metered lines, but their verse is more wave than particle. Meter, rhyme, syntax and image punctuate the wave’s repetitions, but without the wave’s momentum, the gravitational pull it intimates, the sheets will not be rumpled. Rhyme comes easily in Russian, rhythms modulate beautifully through multisyllabic words like малина (raspberry) and марина (Tsvetaeva’s first name) in Akhmatova’s 1961 poem “There are Four of Us («Нас четверо»).” The task in English is to discover patterns that come as readily and, like the Russian, as effects of the poetic impulse or spirit. In contemporary English, predetermined meters and rhymes will be unlikely to sound like impulsive effects, but in their absence — in a free verse — the impulse can also be lost to syntax and semantics. On the other hand, in the interplay of English words that the Russian suggests, slant rhymes and unexpected rhythms do emerge, and a translation, tuned to their music, can be carried in English by an impulse that the “flow of speech” from Russian initiated. The translation becomes an index of the Russian poem. In this way the impossibility of translation produces the possibility in English that Wordsworth called imagination, the “once again” of “something evermore about to be.”^[1]