In the early 1900s, St Petersburg was one of the most exciting cultural centres on Earth. There were Acmeists, Anarchists, Futurists, Symbolists and a slew of other cliques and coteries all fighting it out in the journals and and poetry readings, in the art galleries and concert halls.
Musicians such as
Rachmaninoff,
Scriabin, and
Stravinsky; artists such as
Chagall,
Kandinsky, and
Malevich rubbed shoulders with Symbolist writers such as
Innokenty Annensky,
Andrei Bely and
Alexander Blok.
A new era of poetic expression was succeeding to the grand prose tradition of Russian literature: Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev were all long dead; only Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky were still left standing. Women's voices, too, were beginning to be heard more insistently: painters such as
Natalia Goncharova and poets such as
Anna Akhmatova and
Marina Tsvetayeva were redefining what Modernity could be.
Akhmatova, in particular, achieved early success with her terse, jewel-like lyric poems encapsulating moments of emotional tension between men and women in the glittering world of upperclass Russia. Far from being a proponent of freeing up the constraints of formal versification, though, she believed in the importance of poetic craft over mystical inspiration.
Together with a small group of other writers, including her husband
Nikolai Gumilev and the young
Osip Mandelstam, she formed the Guild of Poets, which subsequently became the anti-Symbolist (and anti-Futurist)
Acmeist movement.
Then came the First World War, and the
Revolution, and the
Civil War. Ronald Hingley's harrowing account of the intertwined lives of four of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century - Akhmatova, Mandelstam,
Pasternak, and
Tsvetayeva - charts the turbulent lives of these supreme individualists in an era of political repression, punctuated by famines, massacres, and periodic violent purges of traitors and (so-called) 'internal émigrés.'
By 1960, when Boris Pasternak died, Akhmatova found herself the last one left standing. Her first husband Nikolai Gumilev was shot by the Soviet Cheka in 1921; Alexander Blok died that same year of scurvy (caused by near-starvation);
Vladimir Mayakovsky, the great poet of the Revolution, shot himself in despair in 1930; Osip Mandelstam was sent into exile, then died in a Labour Camp in 1938; Marina Tsvetayeva returned from abroad at the outbreak of war in 1939, but was sent into exile rather than receiving the welcome she'd been promised - she hanged herself in 1941; Pasternak himself, the great survivor, was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1958 for the crime of allowing his novel
Doctor Zhivago to be published in the West. He died shortly afterwards at his dacha in Peredelkino.
Akhmatova herself, after relentless persecution in the 1940s and 50s, was gradually rehabilitated by the Khrushchev regime. Her work began to appear in print again, and she was even permitted to travel abroad to Sicily and England in 1965. She died shortly afterwards of a heart attack. Thousands attended her funeral.
The Russian-born philosopher
Isaiah Berlin, whose impromptu visit to Akhmatova in 1945 was used as a pretext by the Soviet authorities to denounce the "bourgeois individualism" of her work - Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural commissar, labelled her "half harlot, half nun" -
said of her:
The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure ... not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history ...
In a
1989 interview about that ill-fated meeting in 1945, he commented:
... when I talked with Akhmatova, it was absolutely clear that during the Soviet era ... there were only four poets: there was herself, Mandel′shtam, there was Tsvetaeva, there was Pasternak. Nobody else counted. There were of course other poets ... that was of no interest to her. These four people were the only real ones for her.
Posterity has largely endorsed this verdict.
Anna Akhmatova's Funeral in Leningrad (10 March 1966)
l-to-r: Zoya Tomachevskaya (face obscured), Evgeny Rein, Era Korobova (in fur hat), Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, unknown soldier (on Brodsky's right), Anatoly Naiman,leaning over Akhmatova.
What, then, of her work? It's notorious that some poets "translate better" than others. This is not really based on their merit as writers, but more on the nature of their work. Poets who specialise in clear imagery conveyed in simple, straightforward diction - Guillaume Apollinaire, C. P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot - tend to come across better than those whose interests lie more in testing the limits of expression in their own language.
Mallarmé, Shakespeare, Hölderlin: these are poets whose greatness
in their own tongue more or less has to be taken on trust by foreign readers. Marina Tsvetayeva is definitely one of these writers. Not so Akhmatova. There's a clarity and finish to her work even in English which makes it easy to imagine that you're experiencing, if not the original, at least something very close to it.
I suspect this is often an illusion, but it
has been of great assistance to the continuing strength of her reputation. There are limits, though. Only the first volume of a projected three-volume edition of Lydia Chukovskaya's tell-all
Akhmatova Journals ever actually appeared in English. Fans of the poet (such as myself) are still waiting for the follow-up, thirty years on.
Another reason for Akhmatova's popularity is the perception of her as a "dissident" poet. Before the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, such a label virtually guaranteed a lively sale for any censored memoir or political novel:
Babi-Yar,
Cancer Ward,
The Yawning Heights, these were just a few of the books which hit the bestseller lists in America and Europe. Some of them definitely merited it; others, I fear, probably didn't.
None of Akhmatova's three longer poems -
Requiem (1935-40),
Way of All the Earth (1940), and
Poem without a Hero (1940-65) - were allowed to be published during her lifetime. The first and last of these are now seen as probably her most profound works, far surpassing the collections of short lyrics which were all that had appeared in Russian before her death.
Perhaps the easiest way of giving a idea of the sense of mission which animated her later writing would be to reprint American poet
Stanley Kunitz & British Academic
Max Hayward's classic translation of Akhmatova's
Requiem:
Requiem
- trans.
Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward (1974)
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror
I spent seventeen months waiting in line
outside the prison in Leningrad. One day
somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing
behind me was a woman, with lips blue from
the cold, who had, of course, never heard
me called by name before. Now she started
out of the torpor common to us all and asked
me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly
over what had once been her face.
Dedication
Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe. ...
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.
The sun declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed? ... That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman's tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they'd knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!
Prologue
That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house;
and the regiments of the condemned,
herded in the railroad-yards,
shrank from the engine's whistle-song
whose burden went, "Away, pariahs!"
The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.
I
At dawn they came and took you away.
You were my dead: I walked behind.
In the dark room children cried,
the holy candle gasped for air.
Your lips were chill from the ikon's kiss,
sweat bloomed on your brow – those deathly flowers!
Like the wives of Peter's troopers in Red Square
I'll stand and howl under the Kremlin towers.
II
Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into my house slips the yellow moon.
It leaps the sill, with its cap askew,
and balks at a shadow, that yellow moon.
This woman is sick to her marrow-bone,
this woman is utterly alone,
with husband dead, with son away
in jail. Pray for me. Pray.
III
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound.
I could never have borne it. So take the thing
that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground.
Whisk the lamps away ...
Night.
IV
They should have shown you – mocker,
delight of your friends, hearts' thief,
naughtiest girl of Pushkin's town –
this picture of your fated years,
as under the glowering wall you stand,
shabby, three hundredth in the line,
clutching a parcel in your hand,
and the New Year's ice scorched by your tears.
See there the prison poplar bending!
No sound. No sound. Yet how many
innocent lives are ending ...
V
For seventeen months I have cried aloud,
calling you back to your lair.
I hurled myself at the hangman's foot.
You are my son, changed into nightmare.
Confusion occupies the world,
and I am powerless to tell
somebody brute from something human,
or on what day the word spells, "Kill!"
Nothing is left but dusty flowers,
the tinkling thurible, and tracks
that lead to nowhere. Night of stone,
whose bright enormous star
stares me straight in the eyes,
promising death, ah soon!
VI
The weeks fly out of mind,
I doubt that it occurred:
how into your prison, child,
the white nights, blazing, stared;
and still, as I draw breath,
they fix their buzzard eyes
on what the high cross shows,
this body of your death.
VII
The Sentence
The word dropped like a stone
on my still living breast.
Confess: I was prepared,
am somehow ready for the test.
So much to do today:
kill memory, kill pain,
turn heart into a stone,
and yet prepare to live again.
Not quite. Hot summer's feast
brings rumors of carouse.
How long have I foreseen
this brilliant day, this empty house?
VIII
To Death
You will come in any case – so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me – typhus be my lot –
or spring out of the fairytale you wrote,
the one we're sick of hearing, day and night,
where the blue hatband marches up the stairs,
led by the janitor, pale with fright.
It's all the same to me. The Yenisei swirls
the North Star shines, as it will shine forever;
and the blue lustre of my loved one's eyes
is clouded over by the final horror.
IX
Already madness lifts its wing
to cover half my soul.
That taste of opiate wine!
Lure of the dark valley!
Now everything is clear.
I admit my defeat. The tongue
of my ravings in my ear
is the tongue of a stranger.
No use to fall down on my knees
and beg for mercy's sake.
Nothing I counted mine, out of my life,
is mine to take:
not my son's terrible eyes,
not the elaborate stone flower
of grief, not the day of the storm,
not the trial of the visiting hour,
not the dear coolness of his hands,
not the lime trees' agitated shade,
not the thin cricket-sound
of consolation's parting word.
X
Crucifixion
"Do not weep for me, Mother, when I am in my grave."
I
A choir of angels glorified the hour,
the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire.
"Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?
Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me. ..."
II
Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed,
His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared.
His mother stood apart. No other looked
into her secret eyes. No one dared.
Epilogue
I
I have learned how faces fall to bone,
how under the eyelids terror lurks
how suffering inscribes on cheeks
the hard lines of its cuneiform texts,
how glossy black or ash-fair locks
turn overnight to tarnished silver,
how smiles fade on submissive lips,
and fear quavers in a dry titter.
And I pray not for myself alone ...
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.
II
Remembrance hour returns with the turning year.
I see, I hear, I touch you drawing near:
the one we tried to help to the sentry's booth,
and who no longer walks this precious earth,
and that one who would toss her pretty mane
and say, "It's just like coming home again."
I want to name the names of all that host,
but they snatched up the list, and now it's lost.
I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard,
and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance,
and if a gag should blind my tortured mouth,
through which a hundred million people shout,
then let them pray for me, as I do pray
for them, this eve of my remembrance day.
And if my country ever should assent
to casting in my name a monument,
I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed
not near the seas on which my eyes first opened –
my last link with the sea has long been broken –
nor in the Tsar's garden near the sacred stump,
where a grieved shadow hunts my body's warmth,
but here, here I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars.
Because even in blissful death I fear
to lose the clangor of the Black Marias,
to lose the banging of that odious gate
and the old crone howling like a wounded beast.
And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle,
and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over,
as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.
•
While the decision to try and preserve Akhmatova's original scansion and rhyme scheme is certainly an understandable one, it does unfortunately result in some rather ungainly word choices: rhyming "'Away, pariahs!'" with "Black Marias", for instance.
Subsequent translators, such as
D. M. Thomas, have mostly abandoned the rhymes. Even in English, though, the strength of Akhmatova's grief is palpable, and the courage required to write such a poem at that time, in that place, cannot be ignored.
Perhaps it's too much of a showpiece, too deeply meditated an attempt on a legacy, to be really reflective of the living nature of her verse, though. It shows what she was like when faced with a subject literally beyond articulation.
Let's look instead at something more off-the-cuff, a lyric she wrote on the eve of war in 1914, about a visit to the (then) Russian Top Bard, Alexander Blok:
Александру Блоку
- Анна Ахматова (1914)
Я пришла к поэту в гости.
Ровно полдень. Воскресенье.
Тихо в комнате просторной,
А за окнами мороз.
И малиновое солнце
Над лохматым сизым дымом...
Как хозяин молчаливый
Ясно смотрит на меня!
У него глаза такие,
Что запомнить каждый должен;
Мне же лучше, осторожней,
В них и вовсе не глядеть.
Но запомнится беседа,
Дымный полдень, воскресенье
В доме сером и высоком
У морских ворот Невы.
- To Aleksandr Blok
- trans. Richard McKane (1969)
I visited the poet.
Midday, Sunday.
It was quiet in the big room
and a frost outside the window,
and a crimson sun
above the shaggy dove-grey smoke ...
The silent host
looks at me piercingly.
He has eyes which everyone
always remembers.
Better for me to be careful
and not look into them at all.
But I remember a conversation,
a smoky midday, Sunday
in a high, grey house
by the sea-gates of the Neva.
- To Alexander Blok
- trans. Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward (1973)
I came to the house of the poet.
Sunday. Precisely at noon.
The room is big and quiet.
Outside, in the frosty view,
hangs a raspberry-colored sun
over ropes of blue-grey smoke.
The gaze of my watchful host
silently envelops me.
His eyes are so serene
one could be lost in them forever.
I know I must take care
not to return his look.
But the talk is what I remember
from that smoky Sunday noon,
in the poet’s high gray house
by the sea-gates of the Neva.
- I came to him as a guest ...
for Alexander Blok
- trans. D. M. Thomas (1979)
I came to him as a guest.
Precisely at noon. Sunday.
In the large room there was quiet,
And beyond the window, frost
And a sun like raspberry
Over the bluish-grey smoke-tangles.
How the reticent master
Concentrates as he looks!
His eyes are of the kind that
Nobody can forget. I’d
Better look out, better
Not look at them at all.
But I remember our talk,
Smoky noon of a Sunday,
In the poet’s high grey house
By the sea-gates of the Neva.
- - to Alexander Blok
- trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (1990)
I visited the poet.
Precisely at noon. Sunday.
It was quiet in the spacious room,
And beyond the windows, intense cold
And a raspberry sun
Above shaggy, bluish smoke ...
How keenly my taciturn host
Regarded me!
He had the kind of eyes
That everyone must recall,
It was better for me to be careful,
and not look at them at all.
But I will recall the conversation,
The smoky noon, Sunday
In the tall, gray house
By the sea gates of the Neva.
- For Alexander Blok
- trans. A. S. Kline (c. 2000)
I came to the poet as a guest.
Exactly at noon. On Sunday.
Beyond the window, frost,
Quiet in the room’s space.
And a raspberry tinted sun
Above tangles of blue smoke...
How clearly the taciturn
Master turns, on me, his look!
His eyes are of that kind
Remembered by one and all:
Better take care, mind:
Don’t gaze at them at all.
But I remember our words,
Smoky noon, of a Sunday,
In that high grey house
By the Neva’s sea-way.
- To Alexander Blok
- trans. Andrey Kneller (2014)
I went in to see the poet.
Noon exactly. On a Sunday.
The spacious room is quiet.
But outside, there’s bitter frost
And the raspberry-colored sun
Over shaggy, blue smoke ...
The gaze of my silent host
Is clear and focused on me!
The look in his eyes is such
That everyone must remember;
But as for me, being cautious, —
I’d better not see it at all.
But I’ll remember our talk,
The smoky afternoon, on Sunday,
In the poet’s high, gray house
By the sea-gates of the Neva.
- To Alexander Blok
- trans. Rose Styron (2009)
I have come to call on the poet.
It is Sunday, exactly midday.
The wide room is filled with quiet
and through the casements now I see
a purple sun suspended in frost
over the winding disheveled gray
smoke. My silent host
(how clearly) looks at me.
Luminous, clairvoyant eyes —
Who could forget their gaze? I,
Being prudent, make a choice:
not to look into them. I turn away.
But I shall remember always
that smoky noon, Sunday
in a quiet high gray house
where the Neva courts the sea.
So there we are: seven English versions of the same Russian poem, published over a period of roughly forty years.
This time I
will be making some comparisons with the original. Five years of Russian at school, some fifty-odd years ago, may not have left me with much fluency, but I do have a bit of a reading knowledge still.
The first question has to be, what is this poem about? A visit to another, senior poet, at his mysterious house by the "Sea-gates of the Neva" is the obvious, superficial answer. But of course (as usual) there's more to it than that.
Alexander Blok was, in many ways, a kind of Russian W. B. Yeats. Like Yeats, he had a strong interest in the spiritual and mystical, and - as you can see from the portrait at the head of this set of poems - a sufficiently striking appearance to inhabit the role of Magus or Archpoet with aplomb.
Akhmatova's visit to him is therefore presented as a kind of pilgrimage to an oracle, with portentous invocations of the exact time, place, and weather conditions. She is careful not to look him in the eyes - not so much from fear, as a determination not to surrender to his spell. Instead, it is the
talk she remembers: the talk (it is implied) not so much of master and petitioner, as of two poetic equals.
It's hard to say how real Akhmatova's sense of trepidation at this meeting actually is. She carries it off lightly, but the competition between them is very real. She is, after all, a poet of a very different stripe than Blok, and any admiration she has for his work must be tempered by her Acmeist determination to reject the vague transcendences of the Symbolists.
Like Yeats, Blok tried to reinvent and modernise himself in the years after 1914 ("when the real - not the calendar - twentieth century began," as Akhmatova put it in her
Poem without a Hero). His most famous poem "
Двена́дцать" [The Twelve] (1918) reimagines the 12 Apostles as a set of Red Guards, marching aggressively and violently through a snowstorm towards a distant figure of Christ. The ragged street language in which it was written, plus its revolutionary message, succeeded in alienating almost all of his former admirers. Along with "Скифы" [The Scythians], it showed a harder, more pitiless side to Blok.
Lke so many others who initially welcomed the Revolution (Pasternak, for instance), Blok rapidly became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. When he died in 1921, he hadn't written
any poetry for three years:
He complained to Maksim Gorky that his "faith in the wisdom of humanity" had ended, and explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?"
Is any of this foreshadowed in the poem? Probably not. It was, after all, written just as the First World War was breaking out. There may have been some anticipation of a revolution to come at the time, but nobody could have foretold its nature. But there's still a sense here, if only when it's read in retrospect, of a world poised for change: a 'high grey house" balanced precariously alongside a river notoriously prone to floods. In that sense it reads a little like Pasternak's 1934 novella
The Last Summer, a memory of a time when life still "appeared to pay heed to individuals."
What, then, of the various versions? I guess that I have a soft spot for
Stanley Kunitz's, possibly because it was the first one I ever read. It still seems admirably clear and concise, with careful echoes of the abrupt syntax of the original.
Rose Styron is the only translator who recasts the poem into the present tense. This is, technically, incorrect, as Akhmatova's poem is clearly in past tense: "
Я пришла к поэту в гости" [I came to the poet as a guest]. But I have to say that it has the effect of making the scene more vivid in the mind's eye: it's quite an ingenious device for livening up her version, in fact.
The second line of the poem: "
Ровно полдень. Воскресенье." translates literally as "Exactly Noon. Sunday."
Richard McKane conveys this concisely as "Midday, Sunday"; Kunitz reverses it as "Sunday. Precisely at Noon";
D. M. Thomas uses Kunitz's wording, but goes back to Akhmatova's ordering with "Precisely at Noon. Sunday";
Judith Hemschemeyer - whose breathtakingly complete translation of Akhmatova's work admirers of the poet are so indebted to - repeats Thomas with the single variation of a lower-case "noon" - "Precisely at noon. Sunday";
A. S. Kline varies that slightly as "Exactly at Noon. On Sunday";
Andrey Kneller expands on that slightly as "Noon exactly. On a Sunday"; Rose Styron is the only one to turn it into a complete sentence: "It is Sunday, exactly midday."
There are two great problems when it comes to translating Russian poetry into English. The first is the articles. Russian doesn't use definite and indefinite articles such as "the" or "a" the way we do, so a series of decisions have to be made about how to echo the conciseness of a language which confines itself solely to nouns and verbs in our more padded-out, hybrid tongue.
The other problem is the synthetic / analytic dichotomy. Russian (like other
synthetic languages such as Latin or German) is a language which codes a huge amount of information into each word: nouns have endings which define what case they're in (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, etc.). Verbs, too, have endings which show clearly who it is who's speaking them: me, you, we, they or any other person.
English, by contrast, like other
analytic languages, conveys most of this information with other words surrounding the verbs and nouns. Every time a verb is used, pronouns are required to tell us who's saying what to whom. Also, the order of words in a sentence is crucial to understanding its meaning: "Man bites dog" does not mean the same thing as "Dog bites man" in English.
In Russian, by contrast, the sentence, "
Мужчина укусил собаку" clearly means "Man bites dog" - but it would
still mean that even if you wrote it "
Собаку укусил мужчина." The word ending tells us that "Собаку" is the object, so "Мужчина" must be the subject. Also, that verb ending demands a masculine subject, such as "Мужчина." If, however, you wanted to say "Dog bites man", you would have to write "
Собака укусила мужчину" - once again, the word endings tell us that "Собака" must be the subject, whereas "Мужчину" is now the object. You'll note, too, that the verb ending tells us that it has a feminine subject: "Собака."
You can see what a resource it can be to a poet to be able to convey so much meaning in a single word! In English, though, a cloud of clarifying words is generally required to give the same sense: hence the much greater wordiness of most translations from the Russian, and the consequent temnptation to simplify and abridge to avoid ambiguities.
There's no real dispute as to the meaning of Akhmatova's deliberately simple poem. But each translator has a slightly different sense of the atmosphere of the visit, and the precise significance of Akhmatova's avoidance of the poet's hypnotic eyes in favour of - presumably less dangerous - chit-chat. As you can see, even in this one example, she's a poet of precise details. Ignore such nuances at your peril.
In early 1997 I wrote a short story called "
The Great New Zealand Vortex," which purported to be a reconstruction of the life and work of an imaginary Kiwi Vorticist named Walter E. Clarke.
In its original form, the story included extensive quotations from the preface to
A World Away, a collection of Clarke's literary remains edited in 1947 by a certain Winifred Cannon. Much of this was pruned away before the story first saw print - first in two issues of local journal
evasion 2 (4) & (5) (2003)], and subsequently in my short fiction collection
Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004).
One of the sections which was cut included an adaptation to local conditions of Akhmatova’s poem:
... she concludes her remarks on this first visit [to Clarke, with whom she "may well have been romantically involved"} by quoting from some verses she wrote about it (apparently an imitation of Akhmatova’s famous tribute to Aleksandr Blok).
It is hard to guess what precisely is meant by “the sea-gates of Herne Bay” until one remembers that Akhmatova’s poem closes with a evocation of her own poet’s house “by the sea-gates of the Neva”.
I came to visit the poet
On Sunday, at high noon.
It was quiet in the dusty chamber,
He hummed an Irish tune
As I tried not to meet his glance,
Return the pressure of his eyes;
A raspberry-coloured sun
Blew wood-smoke over the rise.
But the talk is what I remember
From that long-ago Sunday,
In the poet’s sea-green house
By the sea-gates of Herne Bay.
Books I own are marked in bold:
Poetry:
- Вечер [Evening] (1912)
- Чётки [Rosary] (1914)
- Белая Стая [White Flock] (1917)
- Подорожник [Plantain] (1921)
- Anno Domini MCMXXI (1921)
- Тростник [Reed] [two-volume collection of selected poems; compiled but never published] (1924-1926)
- Из шести книг [From Six Books] [publication suspended shortly after release, copies pulped and banned] (1940)
- Избранные Стишки [Poetry Selections] (1943)
- Ива [not published separately] (1965)
- Седьмая Книга [Seventh Book] [not published separately] (1965)
- Стихотворения (Poems] (1958)
- Стихотворения 1909-1960 [Poems: 1909–1960)] (1961)
- Бег Времени [The Flight of Time: Collected Works 1909–1965] (1965)
- Избранное (2004)
- Избранное. Москва: Издателъство ACT, 2004.
Prose:
- О Пушкине: Статьи и заметки [About Pushkin: Articles and Notes] (1977)
Translations:
- Selected Poems. Trans. Richard McKane (1969)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Richard McKane. Essay by Andrei Sinyavsky. 1969. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- Poems of Akhmatova. Trans. Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward (1973)
- Poems of Akhmatova / Анна Ахматова. Избранные Стихи. Selected & Trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. 1973. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1974.
- Requiem and Poem without a Hero. Trans. D. M. Thomas (1976)
- Way of All the Earth. Trans. D. M. Thomas (1976)
- Way of All the Earth. Trans. D. M. Thomas. 1969. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1979.
- Selected Poems. Trans. D. M. Thomas (2006)
- Selected Poems. Trans. D. M. Thomas. 1976, 1979 & 1985. Penguin International Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
- Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Trans. Jane Kenyon (1985)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Richard McKane (1988)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Richard McKane. 1969. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 1989.
- The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer. Ed. Roberta Reeder (1990)
- The Complete Poems (Revised and Expanded Edition). Trans. Judith Hemschemeyer. Ed. Roberta Reeder. 1990. Boston: Zephry Press / Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1997.
- My Half Century: Selected Prose. Trans. Ronald Meyer (1997)
- The Word That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory (Annals of Communism). Trans. Nancy Anderson (2004)
- Selected Poems. Trans. Walter Arndt (2009)
- Final Meeting: Selected Poetry of Anna Akhmatova. Trans. Andrey Kneller (2014)
Secondary:
- Chukovskaya, Lydia. The Akhmatova Journals. Volume I: 1938-41. 1976. Trans. Milena Michalski & Sylva Rubashova. Poetry trans. Peter Norman. Harvill. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.
- Haight, Amanda. Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (1976)
- Hingley, Ronald. Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution (1981)
- Pyman, Avril. The Life of Aleksandr Blok. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979-80.
- The Distant Thunder, 1880-1908 (1979)
- The Release of Harmony, 1908-1921 (1980)
The Muse
- trans.
Robert Chandler (b. 1953)
I feel my life hang by a hair
as I wait at night for the Muse;
youth, freedom, fame melt into air
as my guest appears with her flute.
She enters, tosses back her shawl;
her half-closed eyes let nothing pass.
‘So it was you who sang of Hell
to Dante?’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it was.’
- C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
- Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
- Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)
- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
- Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)
- Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)
- Federico García Lorca (1898-1938)
- Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)
- Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
- Paul Celan (1920-1970)
•
Warwick Freeman: Sentence (2024):
![Велосипедист [Cyclist]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclist_%28painting%29#/media/File:Cyclist_(Goncharova,_1913).jpg){kind=link}
![Муза [The Muse]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Akhmatova#/media/File:AchmatovaLeiden.JPG){kind=link}
