I’m very fond of this poem by Michael Symmons Roberts from the new TLS (which has gone over to a biweekly schedule, shock horror!), but the reason I’m posting it here is that — despite the titular reference to Mandelstam — it reminds me strongly of one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Опять весна [Spring again], which I posted about back in 2018 (with my literal prose version and two poetic translations, one by George Reavey and the other, slightly better in my opinion, by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France), and I thought the resonances were worth noting. Here’s the poem:
Mandelstam Variables – VI
Wildcat city. Crouched. Coiled.
Light on a patrol car beats like a blue heart.
On the outskirts, an empty bread van
speeds home to meet the curfew.
A cuckoo, mad as befits this city,
tells the same joke on repeat
in a belltower without a bell,
– ropes cut, change-ringers dead –
but I, for one night only,
walk as I choose, unwatched, ungrounded,
along the rim of the abyss.
One day, you and I will meet,
I’ve been rehearsing for it,
a speech that will unlock it all for us,
though I fear words will fail us again.
Perhaps we’ll fill our mouths with bread,
so much that talking is impossible.
Just laugh at our gluttony.
The wildcat will doze at our feet.
The first line has a very similar rhythm and structure to Pasternak’s “Поезд ушел. Насыпь черна” [Póezd ushól. Násyp′ cherná, literally ‘Train gone. Embankment black’], and the poems have a similar rhythmic feel; “the same joke on repeat” repeats Pasternak’s theme of repetition, “along the rim of the abyss” is almost identical to “у края обрыва” [at the edge of the precipice], and “words will fail us … talking is impossible” reminds me of “Commotion, gossips’ babbling … snatches of speech” in the Russian poem. I don’t know, maybe it’s all in my mind (lately I’ve been repeating the Pasternak lines as I drift off to sleep), but I thought I’d share it. (I don’t know what Mandelstam poem or poems he might be thinking of — and now that I google “Mandelstam variables” I discover that it’s a thing in theoretical physics, so maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the poet except for the resonance of the name.)
If there is Mandelstam Variables – VI should there be previous 5?
Also, there is a bit of chiasmus in the poem. Last line reflects the first one, fourth line from the end connects to the third from the beginning, “words will fail us again” is foreshadowed by “belltower without a bell”, maybe. Nothing like that from either Mandelstam or Pasternak springs to mind.
When I first read this carelessly I thought the quoted lines were someone’s translation from a Russian original and wondered what the Russian for “wildcat city” was and whether it had resonances in Russian that didn’t immediately come through in translation. Now that I see it’s from an original composition in English, I’m still a bit puzzled. The wildcat popping up at the end seems like perhaps more of a literal wildcat, which seems like it should inform the meaning of “wildcat city” which might otherwise have been presumptively metaphorical. But if so with which metaphor? That what I think of as the standard extended adjectival senses of “wildcat” (“unauthorized by the proper authorities” or “operating outside standard or legitimate practice”) are or at least were Americanisms that might not be immediately on the tip of a British poet’s tongue is a further complication.
If there are earlier poems in the “Mandelstam Variables” series, their content might have had something to do with the name. As it is, the title, as applied to this verse, just seems to be pun. An even more esoteric possibility would be a poem focusing somehow on the letters s, t, and u, the usual symbols for the Mandelstam variables.
@J.W.: I’d say the main meaning of “wildcat” is something threatening, crouched (to spring) in the first line, but completely harmless in the fantasy of the last four lines, which as D.O. says partly reflect the first three as an opposite (and chiastically).
Overall I get a picture of an English city (with change-ringers) under possibly future tyranny and privation—like those Osip Mandelstam knew in the USSR? But I’ve read very few translations from Mandelstam.
Since, as I just learned (for the first time?), the Mandelstam variables have the same value regardless of reference frame, maybe the presumed set of poems have an idea of equivalent conditions in Britain and the USSR or other places.
To me, “Wildcat City” immediately suggests Lexington, KY.
TIL the very cute European wildcat doesn’t occur in Russia.
The immediate associations of “wildcat” (as a modifier) for me are oil wells and (labour, not oil) strikes, neither of which I can read into the poem. Alas.
Crouched makes me think this is an actual wildcat, although coiled seems like a non-specific free-association with an angry predator. I think the wildcat is in apposition to the police, the curfew, a seething anger in a city that has been silenced, its bell-ringers murdered, even its food delivery vans subject to curfew and shortage. (I hadn’t realized change-ringing is a particular type of bell-ringing.)
The poet’s dreams and plans center on finding someone so kindred in spirit that emotionally, they’ll escape the surveillance, be able to converse, to eat fully, gluttonously, and even quell the deep anger raging inside themselves, at least for a day.
But then, I’m from the (NU) Wildcat city of Evanston, IL. It may color my interpretation.
In reaction to the mentions of Lexington (Ky.) & Evanston as potential wildcat cities, I googled the phrase “wildcat nation” which turned up enthusiasts for both the Wildcats of the University of Kentucky AND the Wildcats of Northwestern University. And also (still on the first page of hits; I didn’t go further) the Wildcats of Paris (Tex.) High School, the Wildcats of Vermont Academy, the Wildcats of De Soto (Kan.) High School, and the Wildcats of Goodhue (Minn.) High School,
TIL the very cute European wildcat doesn’t occur in Russia.
The IUCN says it does, in a limited area near the Georgian border, and iNaturalist has recent sightings of F. s. caucasica from that area. (Trigger warning: The two easternmost dots on that map show dead animals.)
The European wildcat’s friend the Afro-Asiatic wildcat, F. lybica, also occurs in the Pontic Steppe part of Russia, so maybe it should have been named the Indo-European wildcat.
Besides wildcat mines and wildcat strikes, there used to be wildcat banks, but they had their heyday before the Panic of 1837.
I did not say this before, because I thought someone would have a much better handle on the poem;
1. Wildcat–symmons roberts is very focused on Manchester, I thought there might be a Mancunian sports team called the Wildcats. There is, but they play water polo.
2. Mandelstam variables–I understand ( but Brett should correct this) that these are used to describe situations where the collision of two particles results in two different particles. I read this as possibly a personal comment about being an aging parent with two children. But symmons roberts has 3 children. So so much for that (unless the putative Mandelstam Variables -I was written before the third child).
Oops, I overlooked the entire north slope of the Caucasus.
I overlooked the entire north slope of the Caucasus.
Careful — the Russians made that mistake once, and it cost them!
When was that?
PlasticPaddy: Prototypically, Mandelatam variables are used in two-particle processes (meaning two particles coming in and two, not necessarily the same, going out). They actually have much wider application, but I would not expect anyone but a particle physicist to be familiar with the more general cases.
In scattering or interaction problems, the Mandelstam s is the primary variable on which things depend when the two incoming particles can (virtually) annihilate. It’s just the total incoming energy squared minus the total incoming momentum squared (modulo factors of the speed of light c). Direct scattering of two particles depends primarily on the Mandelstam t, and if the particles are identical, so that they can switch places during scattering, the dependence is on u.
So the cross section for electron-electron (Møller) scattering receives contributions from both the t and u channels, although in most cases the t channel term is much larger. What makes the Mandelstam variables great is that once one has calculated the electron-electron scattering cross section, the electron-positron (Bhabha) cross section comes along practically for free. Reassigning which are the incoming and outgoing particles transforms one into the other. The part of the Møller matrix element that depends on t becomes a part of the Bhanha matrix element deoending on the s for virtual electron-positron annihilation, and similarly the u-channel contribution to Møller scattering becomes the t-channel contribution to Bhabha scattering.
When was that?
Early 19th century, when they thought they could just waltz in and take the place over and set off decades of uprisings.
Colleagues, it’s proper that I make my report from Bali where I’ve been for two nights and will stay for seven more. Raining all day here, but I swim under the rain and study Bhasa Bali a little.
Wooed by mention of Mandelstam – and chiasmus, even – I tap my report out on my phone in this thread. (An overdue entire break from computers, recommended for all Hatters.)
A core reason for coming again and again to Bali is that for Australians, who labour under the tyranny of distance like few others, it’s the most convenient way to mix with non-émigré Europeans. First, even at the airport before departure from Melbourne, I rapidly formed a rapport with a senior Dublin academic who has read his Joyce and knows his Martello tower as you’d hope. Already his knowledge of Irish has deepened my understanding on certain points, and I look forward to more in our expected correspondence.
This morning I spoke at length with a young professional woman from Petrograd. (An economist, unless the relevant term is a false friend.) Very many Russians here in Ubud, as in the rest of SE Asia apparently. My interest, of course, was in her views on Putin and his wretched war. Well, she first raised the matter with me. In fragmentary Russian I managed to convey the notion that Putin could be characterised as the new Hitler. In almost equally fractured English she expressed her astonishment at this judgement; and in the more satisfactory French that we both settled on I let her know that much of the world agreed with me. No no, she protested: surely that sinister assessment was exactly apt for the “Ukrainian dictator”. I reminded her that dozens of my compatriots were among the murdered when Putin’s unmarked mercenaries downed a civilian aircraft with a Russian missile a few years back, over Ukraine’s east. I appealed to her sense of how things “might appear” if it happened that a country had no free press and a ruthless censor for a ruler. We wished each other well, and left it at that – on perfectly amicable terms. A very welcome experiment in practical epistemics, but yielding no startling revelation of course.
Perhaps more can be said later. I look forward to finding Estonians, whose tiny population – as I’ve noted here before – seem to have a roster system to ensure that a good number of them are always to be found in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Wonderful to hear from you, No! Please report in as you have time and will, and I envy you your experiences.
Phones today are computers, just worse.
Sure, but I wanted to be unable to do my habitual round of things at a keyboard and 43″ monitor.