The Greek Flute’s Theta and Iota

“Флейты греческой тэта и йота” by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Rebekah Spearman. The following poem was never published but was part of Mandelstam’s Voronezh notebooks, written while in exile (this poem is dated to April 1937). Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda, recounts in her memoirs that the poem was written after the arrest of their friend, the flutist Schwab. Mandelstam clearly has one of the origin stories of the Greek aulos in mind. I suspect he is thinking of the myth narrated in Pindar’s Pythian 12 which recounts the murder of Medusa and the creation of the aulos by Athena to imitate the death wail of her sisters.

The Greek flute’s theta and iota,
As if unsatisfied with fame,
Yet un-carved and without answer,
grew up, toiled, through gullies came.

And it’s impossible to leave her,
Not to keep her with clenched teeth,
With lips not loosen up her muscles
Or goad her with the tongue to speech.

But, a flutist will never know quiet:
To him it seems that he’s alone,
That once he carved his native ocean
Out of his native lilac loam.

With noisy, whispering, honor-loving,
With the remembering tread of lips,
He hurries off to be more frugal,
parcels sounds with order and thrift.

After him we don’t repeat him,
Like loam within the ocean’s palms,
And when I’m filled up with the ocean,
my portion has become no balm.

And my own lips are no joy to me,
and murder’s at the very root.
And unwillingly, waning, waning,
I bend the equinox of the flute.