Human nature is like a tree

 

From here.

Osip Mandelstam on poetry

 

Also known as Osip Mandelshtam

"Poetry is a plough that uproots time so that time’s deeper layers, its ‘black earth’, are on top. But there are epochs such as these when humanity as a whole, not content with today, longs for the deep layers of time, like a ploughman it craves the virgin soil of time. A revolution in art inevitably leads to classicism. Not because David reaps Robespierre’s harvest, but because that is what the earth requires."

Translated by AS Kline ( Here)

"I take a line of Latin as my example, since Rome is clearly perceived by the Russian reader as an allegory of duty; the imperative sounds more clearly in the Roman poets. But this is a property of all poetry, once it is regarded as classical. It is perceived as something that must be, not as something that was once created."

*

Later

"Do not demand from poetry pure corporeality, concreteness, materiality. It partakes of the same revolutionary famine. A doubting Thomas, why do you need to touch it with your fingers? And most importantly, why equate a word with a ‘thing’, with grass, with the object that it denotes?

Is the ‘thing’ the master of the word? The word is Psyche. The living word does not denote objects, but freely chooses, as it were, for its dwelling-place, this or that object of significance, materiality, a sweet body. And around the ‘thing’, the word wanders freely, like the soul around that abandoned but unforgotten body."

*

And further

"The poem is alive inwardly, that resounding shell of form that precedes the written poem. Not a single word exists, and yet the poem is already heard. It echoes like an image, internally; it is this act of being heard that touches the poet’s hearing.

And but a moment of recognition is sweet to us!

There is a phenomenon apparent now, a kind of glossolalia (speaking in tongues). In a sacred frenzy, poets are speaking the language of all times, of all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as the dying man's room is open to all, the door of the past is wide open to the crowd. Suddenly, everything has become common property. Go forth, and seize it. Everything is available: all labyrinths, all hidden caches, all secret passages. The word has become not a seven-reeded but a thousand-tubed set of pan-pipes, animated at once by the breath of all the ages. The most striking thing about glossolalia is that the speaker does not know the language he speaks. He speaks a completely unknown language. And it seems to himself and to everyone that he is speaking ancient Greek or Chaldean. A state which is the complete opposite to erudition. Modern poetry, for all its complexity and inner cunning, is naïve."

From Mikhail Sholokhov's Nobel Speech

"Yet it is just the novel that makes possible the most complete comprehension of the world of reality, that permits the projection of one’s attitude to this world, to its burning problems.

One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead of putting forward one’s own tiny ego as the centre of the universe. This genre, by its very nature, affords the very widest scope for a realistic artist."

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"What, then, is the vocation and what are the tasks of an artist who sees himself, not as an image of a god who is indifferent to the sufferings of mankind, enthroned far above the heat of battle, but as a son of his people, a tiny particle of humanity?

To be honest with the reader, to tell people the truth – which may sometimes be unpleasant but is always fearless. To strengthen men’s hearts in their belief in the future, in the belief in their own ability to build this future. To be a champion of peace throughout the world and with his words breed such champions wherever those words penetrate. To unite people in their natural, noble striving toward progress.

Art possesses a great ability to influence people’s intellects and brains. I believe that anyone has the right to call himself an artist, if he channels this ability into creating someting beautiful in the minds of men, if he benefits humanity."