You Will Hear Thunder. Anna Akhmatova
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she was able to speak, not to a small élite, but to the Russian people with whom she so closely and proudly identified. Without condescension, with only a subtle change of style within the frontiers of what is Akhmatova, she was able to inspire them with such patriotic war-time poems as Courage. It is as though Eliot, in this country, suddenly found the voice of Kipling or Betjeman. The encompassing of the serious and the popular within one voice has become impossible in Western culture. Akhmatova was helped by the remarkable way in which twentieth-century Russian poetry has preserved its formal link with the poetry of the past. It has become modern without needing a revolution, and has kept its innocence. In Russian poetry one can still, so to speak, rhyme ‘love’ with ‘dove’.
Akhmatova herself, with her great compeers, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, must be accounted largely responsible for the continuity of Russian poetic tradition. Together, they made it possible for the people to continue to draw strength from them. The crowds who swarmed to Akhmatova’s funeral, in Leningrad, filling the church and overflowing into the streets, were expressing her country’s gratitude. She had kept the ‘great Russian word’, and the Word, alive for them. She had outlasted her accusers: had so exasperated them that, as she put it, they had all died before her of heart-attacks. Mandelstam had perished in an Eastern camp; Tsvetaeva had been tormented into suicide; Pasternak had died in obloquy; Akhmatova had lived long enough to receive the openly-expressed love of her countrymen and to find joy in the knowledge of poetry’s endurance. All four had overcome. The officials of Stalin’s monolith were retiring ‘to rest in card indexes’ in studies of their work. It is a momentous thought. Can it be by chance that the worst of times found the best of poets to wage the war for eternal truth and human dignity?
In this selection of Akhmatova’s poetry I have tried to keep as closely to her sense as is compatible with making a poem in English; and the directness of her art encourages this approach. The geniuses of the Russian language and the English language often walk together, like the two ‘friendly voices’ Akhmatova overhears in There are Four of Us; but they also sometimes clash, and there are times when it is a deeper betrayal of the original poem to keep close to the literal sense than it would be to seek an English equivalent—one that preserves, maybe, more of her music, her ‘blessedness of repetition’. Striving to be true to Akhmatova implies, with equal passion, striving to be true to poetry. When I have found it necessary to depart from a close translation, I have sought never to betray the tone and spirit of her poem, but to imagine how she might have solved a particular problem had she been writing in English.
Together with my previous volume, versions of Requiem and Poem without a Hero, the present selection is intended to be sufficiently large and representative to give English-speaking readers a clearer, fuller impression of her work than has previously been available. Whether or not I have been successful in this, I know that my own gain, from studying her poetry so intimately, has been immense, and beyond thanks, but I thank her.
D.M.T.
(1979)
Notes
1. Hope Abandoned (Collins-Harvill and Atheneum).
* TLS, 16 April 1976.
from Evening
The pillow hot
On both sides,
The second candle
Dying, the ravens
Crying. Haven’t
Slept all night, too late
To dream of sleep . . .
How unbearably white
The blind on the white window.
Good morning, morning!
1909
Reading Hamlet
A dusty waste-plot by the cemetery,
Behind it, a river flashing blue.
You said to me: ‘Go get thee to a nunnery,
Or get a fool to marry you . . .’
Well, princes are good at such speeches,
As a girl is quick to tears,—
But may those words stream like an ermine mantle
Behind him for ten thousand years.
1909, Kiev
Evening Room
I speak in those words suddenly
That rise once in the soul. So sharply comes
The musty odour of an old sachet,
A bee hums on a white chrysanthemum.
And the room, where the light strikes through slits,
Cherishes love, for here it is still new.
A bed, with a French inscription over it,
Reading: ‘Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous.’
Of such a lived-through legend the sad strokes
You must not touch, my soul, nor seek to do . . .
Of Sèvres statuettes the brilliant cloaks
I see are darkening and wearing through.
Yellow and heavy, one last ray has poured
Into a fresh bouquet of dahlias
And hardened there. And I hear viols play
And of a clavecin the rare accord.
. . .
I have written down the words
I have long not dared to speak.
Dully the head beats,
This body is not my own.
The call of the horn has died.
The heart has the same puzzles.
Snowflakes,—light—autumnal,
Lie on the croquet lawn.
Let the last leaves rustle!
Let the last thoughts languish!
I don’t want to trouble
People used to being happy.
Because your lips are yours
I forgive their cruel joke . . .
O, tomorrow you will come
On the first sledge-ride of winter.
The drawing-room candles will glow
More tenderly in the day.
I will bring from the conservatory
A whole bouquet of roses.
1910, Tsarskoye Selo
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.
Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.
Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk’s torn off.
Maybe it’s better I did not become
Your wife.
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it?—Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In