Suddenly in a light shawl

Osip Mandelstam (trans. David McDuff)

Suddenly in a light shawl

you slipped out of the half-darkened hall –

we disturbed no one,

we did not wake the sleeping servants…

Comment:

Comparison with A.S. Kline’s translation indicates “light” is probably literal – not just a statement of weight – in case that wasn’t clear from McDuff’s “half-darkened.” Of course, there is a huge divergence over whether there is a hall and if it is dark that I really don’t want to get into. I’ll go with McDuff because that was the version I was musing on.

I don’t really have much to say. I just know, for myself, I don’t reflect on the radiance of sensuality much. It isn’t as simple as “sex is exciting.” Nor is it as crude as undressing one with one’s eyes. Here, it’s the excitement of someone glowing. We could take the encounter described as before or after intercourse. Either way, the love of the speaker is excited by that “light shawl;” it is “sudden” for him.

It is vital she’s covered even possibly after intercourse. Carnal knowledge isn’t enough to sate the speaker. He’s intrigued by her movement, how she slips out into the hall, how nothing else was disturbed by their togetherness. It’s funny: marriage and relationships are such public affairs. This is attractive because it is intensely private.

I don’t think this poem could, in the final analysis, actually be about a particular sexual encounter. (If it were, there’d have to be 300 lines about who had to call whom before AND after). The fairytale trappings of the poem are overblown. The sensuality is real: there are certainly some encounters like this. But the issue is why they’re important for the speaker. Mandelstam isn’t writing poems to brag about his conquests. The question is the “suddenness” of sensuality, that link between memory and revelation. What we love most hits us out of nowhere and is replayed to cliched effect. It still works, in a way. We think we’re awake even in our dreams. The light may not be true, but it’s better than the darkness. The only privacy we truly have is with a beloved we imagine a lover.