The Noise of Time, the poet says. Mandelstam's title. He's always admired it. Always turned it over in his head. What do you think it is in Russian?, he wonders. He should have asked his Russians, back when he taught them, what the English phrase, The Noise of Time translates. Of course, I would be able to tell him what The Noise of Time translates, if I was anything like a decent translator, he says. If I could translate things to and from the Russian, rather than to and from the Danish, he says.
Time, to the Russian, is as vast as the Russian steppe, he images, the poet says. Time is as vast as Russian space is vast, their whole vast country. To the Russian, time is a cathedral that could hold any cathedral, the poet says. No: it's the night above all cathedrals, greater than them, higher than them, drawing their steeples up higher. No: time is the night above all nights, the absence of stars above the starry rift. Isn't that a lovely phrase, he says, the starry rift?
That's what he can hear, or thinks he can hear, the poet says, changing metaphors, when he lowers his ear to find time. What would it mean, he often wonders, to make sound from silence, to speak not by adding more noise to the world – there's too much noise! – but by subtracting silence from noise. It would be like drawing with a finger on condensated glass, he says.
Ah, but these are Russian thoughts, not Danish ones, he says, and no doubt this is all beyond me.
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