Keeping Time: Reading and Writing in “Conversation about Dante”

Abstract

This article approaches Osip Mandel'shtam's “Conversation about Dante” as a demonstration of and meditation on reading. As such, Mandel ‘stam's essay addresses the perennial problems of our relationship to the authority of writing and the preservation of literary culture across time, largely through a cluster of metaphors around the central image of a conductor's baton. The visible instrument of musical measure, the baton figures synesthetic transcription in the arts and, most urgently, the undulating line of script traced by the writing pen that becomes realized as waves of sound in the poem's oral performance. “Keeping Time” elucidates the philosophy of notation and performance to which the figure of the baton alludes, and contextualizes it within Mandel'shtam's efforts to reconcile the political and poetical functions of written authority.