Osip Mandelstam: 'When the goldfinch...'

When the goldfinch, in his airy confection,
Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake,
His spite sets off his scholar's robes,
Shows to advantage his cute black cap.

And he slanders the hundred bars,
Curses the sticks and perches of his prison
And the world's turned completely inside out,
And surely there's a forest Salamanca
For birds so smart, so disobedient.

                                               December 1936


Tr. Andrew Davis. Mandelstam, then in internal exile in Voronezh, wrote several bird poems in this period: he was a caged singer. "Salamanca" might refer both to the city's famous university and to Cervantes / Don Quixote, fellow-prisoners of the state and of extra-worldliness.