Kamburova had such a song in the Soviet years – “Charlie Chaplin” to Mandelstam’s verses. But what sounds organic in a song (music is important in the same place, theatricality, intonation and text are incomplete) looks strange in a poetic text.
Mandelstam’s text seems to have not been born yet. Little chewed.
It feels like a sketch. (Or was he looking for a new form, but didn’t quite understand what he was looking for yet?)
Charlie Chaplin retired from cinema.
Two soles, cleft lip
two scouts filled with ink
and beautiful confused powers.
Charlie Chaplin – cleft lip
two soles – a miserable fate.
Somehow we all live wrong – strangers, strangers.
This is the very beginning of the text, in the future rhythmic oddity will be repeated not only with the word “alien”. For example, with the words “and even famous” (again, they stick out like dentures).
But do we care about the future? (In many editions, the text is printed differently than here, but there is already some confusion with capital letters at the beginning of the lines, so I am editing the text on purpose.) After all, we do not know what to make of the second stanza. with this bulky line. “Aliens, aliens” seem to hang in the air. The composer Dashkevich, the author of the music, feels this and simply adds: Charlie Chaplin.
Two soles – a miserable fate.
Somehow we all live wrong –
Aliens, Aliens, Charlie Chaplin.
And everything falls into place. But was this what Mandelstam himself wanted?
All the poems of 1937 (and the poem about Charlie Chaplin or its draft marked early June 1937) are quite classic in prosody: there are no breaks in text and intonation, no suspended words. Neither “Pear and cherry targeted me” (May 4, 1937), nor “I am with Koltsov, looped like a hawk” (January 9, 1937), not a single poem, it crumbles before our eyes, Chaplin’s. Nowhere do the lines bounce and break like here. Either it was really a sketch and the publisher conveyed everything he saw in the manuscript, or Mandelstam’s consciousness was already beginning to crumble, and then he cheered himself up and calmed down for a while.
Tin fear on your face,
The head never stops.
Soot walks, wax mince,
And quietly Chaplin says:
why am i glorious and loved
and even famous?
And the highway leads him big
to strangers, to strangers.
Where does such a rough patch come from?
Maybe this rough montage by Chaplin (and because he likes Mandelstam movies, likes to watch: Chaplin still wobbles with him in the poem “I pray like pain and pity”) could be just that? So rude (too wide trousers, a tight jacket, a bowler hat, a mustache – all this is easy to draw like a cartoon) immediately falls on us from the screen and is remembered.
It squirms like a cartoon, a hybrid, a combination, and a bunch of weirdos. Her stockings are separate as usual, ballerina feet are separate. He looks like he wants to dance, but he’s limping. He seems to want to move forward but hesitates (you won’t go that far). From this, all the chases of a cop or the criminal behind him are ridiculous: in principle, it is not difficult to catch him, but for some reason it still does not work.
Or the same hat: he often removes it (a characteristic, but also self-contradictory gesture, a false gesture: he politely removes the bowler hat and immediately throws a cake at the opponent or “thanks” for the incoming biscuit). He rises, but never parted with it. It is eternal. Like a Kashcheev needle: the hero who loses it loses himself.
Thus Chaplin becomes a symbol.
Draw a mustache, a black hat, preferably a round one, and you do not even need to draw a face. No eyes, no nose. And Charlie Chaplin is already there.
In The Mechanical Ballet (Fernand Léger’s film), Charlie Chaplin is composed before our eyes by a mechanical Cubist still life piece. There is a figure, a face on top of the figure, even thick black hair, but still we do not know anyone.
But here, in the third picture, the conditional figure raises a conditional straight hand in a black bowler hat (without even wearing it) – and we have already learned: yes, this is Chaplin!
… Chaplin told somewhere: in one of the dressing rooms he found large trousers that had once been too big for him. And a tight vest. And suddenly an idea came to his mind.
The pants and the top of the suit seem to say to the audience, “They are all different people.”
“I’m made up of conflicting people, actually I’m a cute Frankenstein, mulatto, walk like a ballerina, have a black mustache, my pants are so wide it looks like there’s nothing. in them. And it can’t be.”
Can you imagine the character Charlie having sex? Not me.
Only insatiable love, only longing and quest, the impossibility of happiness, the endless road, the misplaced excess of the queue (like a walking stick by an unfortunate passer-by or a walking stick by which the enemy will soon stumble), carefree restlessness and cheerful orphanhood.
Can you imagine Charlie Chaplin’s character finally happy? I can’t do it.
There are always heroes who are alone. They will never have a couple. Well, for a long time at least. This is Pinocchio, this is Shapoklyak, this is Kolobok, this is Charlie Chaplin.
Maybe Pinocchio gets himself a wooden doll (or God bless the Nutcracker), but he quickly gets bored, so he rushed to look for new adventures on his nose.
Maybe it was when Shapoklyak was young, and some respectable engineer or accountant in a felt hat looked at him, but boring, boring. And so she bought herself a pillbox hat (almost a bowler hat, just flattened), a very tight black dress with white ruffles on the collar, cuffs and hem, a rat – and adya.
Maybe he’d like to find some Pyshechka for himself in Kolobok. Yeah, it didn’t reach him, he ruined his songs.
Charlie-Charlie misses love, but always walk away from him, like a ballerina, flipping your fingers, with a strange gait like a mechanical toy. Go through us, out of courtesy, lift your bowler hat, stand by our life without any use, sympathize with us without pity or interest, maybe cry – for all of us, our life and your life. But only for a short time.
Charlie, Charlie,
you have to take risks.
you’re crazy
limping at the wrong time.
your pot –
same ocean
And Moscow is so close, even fall in love
on the way, on the way.
And again this crutch of the last line: we stumbled and fell.
And everyone is laughing.
Source: Gazeta
