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John Torrance

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On reading, very belatedly, Nadezhda Mandelstam's 'Hope against Hope'

Astonishing, how well you feel you know her!
A charity shop, a dog-eared paperback,
and then, from a grim and half-forgotten time
steps out this brave companion, sharp as mustard,
as if we’d spent the years exchanging thoughts—
alarming as that shrewdness might have been.

Her purpose, however, was not this gift of herself
to her readers, but bearing witness and keeping truth,
to save from cruel extinction by silence and exile
and death on the road to Kolyma, her husband’s flame—
to carry it out of the whirlwind, cupped in her hands.
And he’s all here—gentle ironical humour,
generous anger, dauntless self-dedication,
joy when the hum in his head was resolved in words.

But it’s also the tale of a ‘we’, and all the more so
for knowing it’ll break. She kept that pain to herself.
But we see her at work in Strunino, a widow on night shift,
repeating his poems, burning them into her brain,
not doubting their day would come. Osip we revere,
but the voice that tells his story’s a late-found friend.

 

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