SEMI-AWAKE, SEMI-DREAM
ROVSHAN MAMEDKULIEV

 

 

White light falls in cold measure In damp forest on summer day In my heart I am slowly carrying Sadness, like bird colored gray.
What to do with a bird that is wounded? She went silent, then died as well. From a fogged-over belltower Someone has stolen the bell.
And here stands the silent Muted and orphaned height Like a tower white and empty In foggy and quiet night.
Morning abysmally tender Semi-awake, semi-dream, Foggy ringing of thoughts, Oblivion like a scream.

Osip Mandelstam

Rovshan Mamedkuliev, guitar

Suggestive verses from the pen of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) are the image that ties together a musical anthology woven together from works with strong attachments to both Russia and Spain. Mandelstam was a transcendental Warsaw-born Russian poet who was aligned with the Acmeist school in the first years of the twentieth century, poets who sought compactness and clarity through what they saw as a form of neo-classical modernism. The title verse adopted here is an evocation of solitary desolation of eternal sadness nurtured, in this case, in “the endlessly tender morning… semi awake, semi dream —oblivion unquenched— the foggy chiming of thoughts.”

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