I have forgotten the word I meant to say

I have forgotten the word I meant to say.
The blind swallow will return to the palace of shadows
On clipped wings, to play with the transparent ones.
In oblivion the night song is sung.

And on the lips, like black ice, there burns
And torments the memory. The word is missing.
It cannot be invented: it hums of its own accord,
Swaying the bell of the night's oblivion.

And slowly it grows, like a tent or a temple,
Now suddenly it pretends to be mad Antigone,
Now as a dead swallow it throws itself at one's feet
With Stygian tenderness and plague-stricken passion.

Oh, if only I could bring back both the shame of seeing fingers
And the rounded joy of recognition.
I am so afraid of the sobbing of the Aonides,
Of mist, of ringing, and of the gaping void.

But mortals are given the power to love and to recognise,
For them even sound will pour into the fingertips,
But I have forgotten what I want to say,
And the bodiless thought will return to the palace of shadows.

But it is not of that that the transparent one keeps repeating,
Ever the swallow, the girlfriend, Antigone...
And on the lips, like black ice, there burns
The Stygian remembrance of a ringing.

Literal translation

Osip Mandelstam, November 1920