Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam

after Osip Mandelstam

Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.

So I’ve also included a translation, by David McDuff, of Mandelstam’s poem [from Osip Mandelstam : Selected Poems, trans. by David McDuff; p. 67. NY : FSG, 1975]