https://jacket2.org/commentary/ian-probstein-mandelstam-stalin-epigram
All get something wrong. Or miss things.
So "mountaineer" is "gorets"--which can mean "highlander." It can also be somebody from the town of Gori. Stalin was.
The "cockroaches on the top lip" seems to be a similar sort of translation to most, but it's really his "large cockroach eyes laugh".
The whole "horseshoe" thing is a bit difficult, too. "Kak podkovu, darit za ukazom ukaz" when written is something like "He bestows dictate after dictate, like a horseshoe: now to a groin, now to a forehead, now to a brow, now to an eye". But said out loud, it sounds like "he strikes dictate after dictate, like a horseshow: now for somebody groin, now for somebody's ...". Some split the difference and work "forge" in there.
I don't know how to put the "berry" thing into English--it's a term from Russian cant, and all the translations miss that. Maybe something like "Even his sentences are daisies pushed up"?
But the first few lines are ominous and it's hard to get that in transation: The implication is that you speak quietly out of fear, and you are only heard at a distance intentionally, when you think you need to say good things about the "gorets"--and, in fact, you actually do feel the need to be heard mentioning the Leader in approved ways. It's not "be quiet and it'll be okay," it's "you must sincerely praise the leader or be suspect."
Pasternak when he read this told Mandelstam that it was less poetry and more suicide note. Mendelstam was immediately arrested and reliably tried. He was sentenced to death and until his appeal was heard he was exiled to the Urals. When he heard his sentence was confirmed and he committed suicide.
I've known Holocaust survivors that looked at the flippant use of "grammar nazi" with benevolence. It minimized the nazis, but it was flippant. They strongly objecte to calling Reagan or Bush I or Clinton "nazi" because it wasn't flippant. The idjits who called any one of them a nazi was simply benighted, and confused mild irritation with torture and genocide because they were, well, self-centered wusses. They had even less appreciation for other Holocaust survivors who tried to paint somebody as Hitler.
One of my diss advisors lived during this time. His grandfather was a noted Symbolist poet. He fled Russia soon after the Revolution to live poorly in, I think it was, Germany. He had no contact with his son, and his poetry was banned. It was a wise move. By 1933 Mendelstam had seen friends and colleagues force themselves abroad to live in poverty, stay put and commit suicide, stay put and be forced to become government hacks, or just vanish. You study Russian poetry from before about 1925 and then look at what happened to them, and it's a disaster. The lucky found inoffensive ways to fly under the radar, and the truly talented and lucky managed to pull it off.
My advisor's son, a talented prose writer, denounced his father later when he needed to. Because otherwise the prose writer would have seen on his own skin what comes when the government controls your life and doesn't like you: Government provided ration coupons for food, job, and housing? Piss off the government, and you don't have food, money, or a roof. The prose writer had a son of his own. The sins of the fathers pass down to the sons. And the sons' families. The Communist Party wasn't big on simple forgiveness and was into swift justice. Oh--and while the government was the sole provider of jobs, it was also a crime to not have a job if they decided to prosecute you. So if the government fired you, you could be arrested the next day for unemployment, called "parasitism." Or they could let you hang on with that as a threat for years. (Getting money from abroad was illegal.)
The prose writer was "asked" by the benevolent Lenin government to write the proper kind of story. The stories he had written weren't suitable for Soviet readers, and they had vanished from circulation. Like his father's poetry, the books that contained them vanished from libraries. Vsevolod tried, found it too false, said he couldn't write good prose on command and was assigned a reporter's job. Where he was told to write the proper kind of story. Over the next 15 years or so he drank himself to death. But if he had said no, his son would have paid dearly. But by the time he died then the man who was my advisor had managed to get to college, where he did well and graduated. He kept his nose clean. He behaved himself--became a good Communist Party member, even though it denounced his grandfather and caused his father to drink himself to death--and he went to the meetings, and followed the Soviet dictum of "say one thing, think a second, do a third". That kind of government produces a lot of hypocrisy. In due course the poet's grandson became a professor and was widely published, dozens of articles and some monographs.
Then one day he was hauled before the political police. His department had been shut down that morning. His field was suddenly bourgeois and banned. He was bourgeoisie and a traitor to the USSR. He was asked to inform in exchange for mercy. He says he didn't. Still, some of his colleagues and students vanished, never to appear again. His publications vanished from libraries--his field only appeared in public discourse when condemned. The matter of his father's older prose and his grandfather's transgressions came up--neither were allowed in print even after 25-30 years. He was exiled to a Baltic republic--since he had a sort of second specialty, he found a entry-level faculty job there. The security apparatus there was pretty intense and all-encompassing after WWII and annexation, all those Estonians that needed to be made to eat their peas. And as a Russian, he helped disenfranchise and disempower the local population. It was years before he could return to Moscow with his wife and children. He was rehabilitated, but that still didn't allow him residency in Moscow, much less appointment to a university there. He had half a dozen monographs, scores of publications in obscure journals, but because he was politically unreliable he was still in exile. Had to get special permission to attend conferences. And when he applied for faculty jobs, the politruk, the political advisor in all places of work and education, had to be consulted. Because not only did the government provide food, shelter, work, and healthcare, it also prescribed where you could live and travel to. The political advisor was often more important than the "CEO", and s/he answered purely to the KP SSSR.
It was the late '80s when he could talk openly about his grandfather and father, and the leaders were brave enough to allow his ancestors' works--just words--to be published. Only then he could return to Moscow and even go to conferences abroad. That was about the same time that Mendelstam's "Kremlin Highlander" appeared (termed "Stalin epigram" by many in need of a title). My 1970s Russian literature textbooks mention none of them.
Trump's not even Andropov, much less Brezhnev, who didn't rise to Khrushchev's level, who barely could peer over Stalin's little toe. It's almost treasonous to say this. But at the same time, there were those who were convinced that the concentration camps were built and waiting to be filled by Bush II--maybe first he'd do the sure thing and bomb Iran, maybe he'd just declare emergency. Some doubted he'd allow elections to be held. The first time. It was foolish, it was stupid. As stupid as the students, mimicking their parents, who told me that Trump was going to round up all the ___________ and put them in concentration camps. (The blank could be "Muslims," or "illegal immigrants," or "blacks". For such, one word: Risperdal.)
If Trump were even just Andropov, you'd already have the FBI sitting in your living room. Even if you weren't home. If he were Brezhnev, they'd also have visited your spouse's place of employment and checked with any teachers or professors your offspring might have. And when they talked to you, they'd let you know this, lest you forget that it's not just you at risk, but them. If Stalin, by now you'd be in custody and depending on your level of servility and usefulness, you'd know that your family would soon be in custody and the level of political penalty they'd pay: Would they be unemployed for a while, have to find minimum-skilled labor, would your kids be allowed to go to a good school, or would it be really bad so they'd lose their housing and maybe learn they'd be assigned to some small Kazakh village? Or maybe they'd stand trial with you. Many a person, upon doing something stupid like this, hurriedly filed for divorce and found someplace else to be so that when the landslide came, and it surely would, friends and family woudn't be too close. I don't see this kind of thing happening. (At best it might happen if you're an illegal immigrant and do something actually bad. Then again, that's not a Trump thing. It also would happen in Mexico, in France, in Sweden. Most countries have ways of dealing with illegal immigrants that don't rise to the level of asylum-seeker. Even in the Czech Republic, I had to give the local police a copy of my passport and keep them updated as to where I was staying.)
It's best not to confuse hyperbole and smart-assedness with reality.
By the way, a children's writer of no small renown, Korney Chukovskii (Chukovsky) wrote a children's verse called "The Big Cockroach", Tarakanishche. Anybody who was semi-literate--and this excluded the censors--identified the Cockroach as Stalin. Mustache, and all that. Chukovskii wrote this in 1921, pre-Stalin. But he was so afraid that he'd be accused of subversion he even feared meeting relatives who were suspected of being disloyal: That might have made them suspect him of subversion, and make it harder for them. Once the Soviet government suspected you, they'd did and dig until they found something, and everybody's done something wrong some time, somewhere. You knew somebody who was under indictment, you certainly had done something at some point that could be taken wrong. Ill-will and suspicion too easily substitute for fact and logic. Esp. when you don't think some deserve due process and since they're guilty, why give them the benefit of the doubt? It's all very HUAC. But the original template for HUAC (which, when the rubber met the road, didn't actually punish anybody directly--it was the
HUAC, after all).
So, The Big Bad Cockroach.
(Summary: The animals heard there was a threat. Various showed up, wolves and hippos and crayfish and whatnot. Then the Tarakan, the cockroach, appears.)
Он рычит, и кричит, He roars and cries
И усами шевелит: and twitches his mustache:
"Погодите, не спешите, Hold up, don't hurry
Я вас мигом проглочу! I'll gulp you down in a flash
Проглочу, проглочу, не помилую ". Gulp you down, gulp you down, I won't have mercy
All the animals went to fight him, then ran away, screaming in confusion and fear without actually, well, fighting him. By the end of part I, the tarakanishche had won and all the animals cowered.
Вот и стал Таракан So the Cockroach
победителем, was the winner
И лесов и полей повелителем. and ruler of the fields and woods.
Покорилися звери усатому. The animals submitted to the mustachioed one.
(Чтоб ему провалиться, (Damn him and blast him!)
проклятому!)
А он между ними похаживает, He would stroll among them
Золоченое брюхо поглаживает: Patting his gilded paunch:
" Принесите-ка мне, звери, "Yes, bring me, you animals,
ваших детушек, "your little kiddies,
Я сегодня их за ужином "Today at supper
скушаю! " "I'll eat them up!"
So it went.
Но однажды поутру But once in the morning
Прискакала кенгуру, A kangaroo, jumping, showed up
Увидала усача, when she caught sight of the mustached on
Закричала сгоряча: she shouted out without thinking,
"Разве это великан? "This is your giant?
(Ха-ха-ха!) (Ha-ha-ha!)
Это просто таракан! "It's just a cockroach!
(Ха-ха-ха!) (Ha-ha-ha!)
Таракан, таракан, "A cockroach, a cockroach,
таракашечка, "a crappy little cockroach
Жидконогая "a wobbly-legged
козявочка-букашечка. "gnatty little bug.
И не стыдно вам? "How is it you're not ashamed of yourself?
Не обидно вам? "How is it you're not offended?
Вы - зубастые, "You--the ones with big teeth,
Вы - клыкастые, "You--the ones with the fangs,
А малявочке "To such a puny little thing
Поклонилися, "You bowed!
А козявочке "And to a little gnat,
Покорилися! "You yielded!"
Испугались бегемоты, The hippos took a fright,
Зашептали: "Что ты, что ты! And whispered, "What are you saying!
Уходи-ка ты отсюда! Get out of here now!
Как бы не было нам худа! " And maybe nothing bad will happen to us"
Только вдруг из-за кусточка, But suddenly from behind a little bush,
Из-за синего лесочка, From a dark woods
Из далеких из полей From fields afar
Прилетает Воробей. A Sparrow flies and lands
Прыг да прыг Hoppity hop
Да чик-чирик, And chirpy-chirp,
Чики-рики-чик-чирик! Chirpity-chirpity-chirp!
Взял и клюнул Таракана, It snatched and pierced the Tarakan with its beak
Вот и нету великана. And the giant was no more.
Поделом великану досталося, It served the giant right,
И усов от него не осталося. and not even his mustache was left.
And the animals of the forest lived happily ever after.
(If you don't know Russian and ever study it, Chukovskii is required reading nobody will ever assign. On the one hand, it's just really fun to say out loud, you wind up laughing. On the other, the verse is really clever. And pretty much every Russian knows it, in some cases large chunks of it by memory.)
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for America.
