OSIP MANDELSTAM
Eyesight of Wasps
(translated from the Russian by Richard & Elizabeth McKane)

Armed with the eyesight of slender wasps,
sucking at the earth's axis, the earth's axis,
I feel everything that ever happened to me,
and I memorise it, but it's all in vain.

I don't draw and I don't sing,
and I don't play the violin with a black-voiced bow.
I drive my sting only into life, and love
to envy the powerful, cunning wasps.

Oh, if I could be compelled
by the sting of the air and the summer warmth
to pass through the worlds of dreams and death,
to sense the earth's axis, the earth's axisŠ

[1937]

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